January 25: Lisa Sigal
Lisa Sigal was born in Philadelphia, PA. In her recent work, Lisa Sigal has been painting on walls and making forms that combine painting with architecture. Her work suggests a mutable delineation between interior and exterior and explores their meaning both socially and politically. Utilizing and expanding upon notions of space, she investigates how art can challenge set ideas about property, containment and freedom.
Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been exhibited at the The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox and the Brooklyn Museum. Upcoming Shows include New York New York at the Essl Museum in Vienna, Pushing Paintings Paradigm at the Mason Gross Galleries. Rutgers University, an exhibit at LAX ART space in Los Angeles and a solo show at Samson Projects in Boston. She received an Art Matters Grant and Creative Capital Grant in 2012, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, the Joan MItchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. Sigal lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
February 7: Dan Walsh
Dan Walsh's large-scale paintings draw from the tradition of Minimalism. Rendered by hand, Walsh's geometric compositions waiver with faint imperfection. Seemingly straight edges subtly bow and warp with undulating movement, creating tessellated fields of disorientation. Reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt’s subliminal plaids or Sol LeWitt’s optical illusions, Walsh uses the multiplicity of ordered form to draft algorithmic blueprints. Through repetition, Walsh’s work suggests endless expansion, fluctuating between the intimate and infinite. Walsh uses perspectival deception to make his flat surfaces appear to advance and recede simultaneously, provoking alternating sensations of gravity and weightlessness.
Transgressing the Minimalist’s objective purity, Walsh’s paintings both envelop artistic tautology and reflect the contemporary experience of virtual reality. His grid-like compositions give subliminal suggestions of computer or television screens. However, his painstaking technique and hand-draw lines prize personal negotiation over synthetic precision. Walsh’s combination of brightly coloured tones and delicate wonkiness gives his work an underlying sense of play. He studied at the Philadelphia College of Art in Pennsylvania and Hunter College in New York City. A veteran of nearly thirty solo exhibitions Walsh’s work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Royal Academy in London. He is represented by Paula Cooper in New York and Paolo Curti in Milan. Dan Walsh (born 1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a painter based in New York.
February 21: Josephine Halvorson
Josephine Halvorson makes oil paintings on site. Halvorson finds objects in their environments that "look back", those which show traces of human activity and the passage of time. Working directly from perception, and often completing her paintings in a single session, Halvorson’s process yields a prolonged closeness and shared experience with her chosen subject. This collaboration between artist, materials, and environment forges a painting that becomes a record of the artist’s conversation with the world and a testament to time spent. Though Josephine’s practice is nomadic, her studio is based in Brooklyn. Originally from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Halvorson studied art in New York City at The Cooper Union (BFA 2003) and Columbia University’s School of the Arts (MFA 2007). She has spent two yearlong residencies in Europe, in Vienna, Austria as a Fulbright Fellow (2003-4), and in Paris, France as a Harriet Hale Woolley Fellow (2007-8). Halvorson's awards include grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2009) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (2010). She teaches painting at Princeton University and in the MFA program at Yale University.
Halvorson's work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions, including Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris (2012), “Clockwise From Window” at Monya Rowe, New York (2009) and “What Looks Back” at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2011), “Americanana” curated by Katy Siegel at Hunter College (2010), and “Still” curated by Peter Fleissig at Frith Street Gallery, London (2012). Halvorson’s work is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris.
March 7: Nancy Haynes
Nancy Haynes is a conceptual painter working within the parameters of non-representational, deconstructivist thinking. Haynes describes her painterly intention as an attempt to make paintings ”which describe their own nature”. Haynes has exhibited in the US and internationally, and has received numerous awards. Her work is in many collections including MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the National Gallery among others. Recent exhibits include the painting undressed at 3A Gallery, New York, NY, Nancy Haynes at George Lawson Gallery, LA, Letters Not About Love at Regina Rex Gallery in Bushwick, NY and a traveling exhibit entitled art=text=art Works by Contemporary Artists from the Sally and Wynn Kramarsky Collection – at the Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, NJ.
“however much Haynes’ painting may be about erasure and emptying, the way they are emptied and erased fills them with an idea of painting as a place where the unrealizable may be made visible.”*
*from the Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe essay, Endspace: From a real to an absolute Nancy Haynes paintings 1974 – 1998
March 14: Tommy White
Tommy White received a B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School and an M.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art. He has taught at Columbia University, The Montserrat College of Art, The Massachusetts College of Art, and the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. Tommy is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Award. He is currently represented by the Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York. His work has been reviewed and/ or discussed in periodicals including Artforum, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, Art Review, Art & Auction, the Portland Tribune, Art News, The Oregonian, Time out New York, and The Village Voice.
April 4: Susan Lichtman
Susan Lichtman’s interiors and figurative work are more derived from memory, sketch’s and some photo reference rather than being directly from observation. Her paintings often depict domestic scenes with a hint of narrative that are based on views from her home of many years. However, the most compelling subject is the marvelous inventions of light and color arrangements using flattened abstracted forms interacting in a potent visual drama. Susan Lichtman studied at Brown University and then attended the Yale University School of Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, where she worked with William Bailey, Bernard Chaet, Gretna Campbell, and Andrew Forge. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University where she has taught since 1989.
April 18: Tala Madani
Born in Tehran in 1981, Tala Madani is one of the most engaging painters of her generation. Madani’s work is characterised by loose expressive brushwork rendered in a bold, distinctive palette. Rich in narrative and heavy in irony Madani’s paintings depict darkly comic mise-enscénes. Whilst her more abstract large-scale works usually contain a mass, group or collective, Madani’s more descriptive and intimately scaled paintings, and painterly video animations, depict uncomfortable scenes in which bald, middle-aged men engage in absurd scenarios that fuse playfulness with violence and perversity. Whilst the figures imagined are stereotypical and loaded with associations, the activities in which they are engaged are strange and absurd. Through her distinctive painting technique, Madani imbues recurring symbols and imagery with a complexity that cannot be reduced to any single reading. Products of curiosity, fantasy, and desire, Madani’s paintings provoke a cacophony of interpretation that exceeds mere commentary. As such they exist as ‘vignettes for experimentation,’ as powerful meditations on the tension between the stereotypical and the iconic. After receiving her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006, Madani made her solo debut in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amster- dam (2011); Manual Man, Pilar Corrias, London (2011). Recent group exhibitions include He disappeared into complete silence; rereading a single artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Museum De Hallen, Amsterdam (2011); Speech Matters, Danish Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venice (2011); The Great New York, P.S. 1 MoMA, New York (2010); 4th Tirana International Contempoary Art Biennial, Tirana (2009); Greater New Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009). Madani was awarded the Kees Verwey Fellowship and was artist in residence at The Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam in 2007. Tala Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.