4 NOW Gilles Giuntini Anahita Mekanik Edmond Praybe Carolyn Sheehan clockwise from left: Carolyn Sheehan, Untitled, 2014, mixed media on paper, 48 x 32 inches Gilles Giuntini, The Modesty of Claret Petacci, 2014, mixed materials, 34 x 38 x 24 inches Anahita Mekanik, Deliverance, 2013, mixed media, 60 x 18 x 18 inches Edmond Praybe, Evening Light, 2015, oil on panel, 12 x 16 inches December 1 - 19 Opening Reception: Saturday, December 5, 3 - 5pm First Street Gallery caps off the year with 4 Now, an exciting new exhibition that celebrates the unique and dynamic visions of four of its newest artists, Gilles Giuntini, Anahita Mekanik, Edmond Praybe, and Carolyn Sheehan. Gilles Giuntini fabricates complex intimate narratives that reference both historical and personal events. These carefully crafted pieces are at once seductive but beyond reach. The viewer is drawn in, but kept at a distance. This physical tension is at the core of each piece. Through irony and humor Giuntini weaves disparate scenarios into something familiar...a world of paradox and hypocrisy.    Anahita Mekanik is a story-teller who speaks through the random objects that find their way into her life. The more damaged, old and ordinary these are, the more potent are the memory and message they carry. By giving a new soul to these abandoned treasures, she participates in the universal ritual of transformation.   Edmond Praybe makes paintings that attempt to reevaluate perceptions of the environment he inhabits while celebrating the union of observation, invention, and memory. The works are literal explorations - made on-site or at least partially so - as well as artist explorations, dealing with a variety of attitudes concerning color, structure, scale, and narrative. Edmond searches for broadly identifiable themes and feelings in the image, while also depicting a specific sense of time and place in each piece.   Carolyn Sheehan creates art works that are best described by color and images. She combines creativity and imagination with emotions in every piece with the sole purpose of not only creating an aesthetic that impacts the feelings but causes pleasure as well. Every piece is worked like a sculpture: three dimensional and take shape in a style in which the icon is always the focal point.       For more info go to:http://www.firststreetgallery.org/exhibitions/2015-2016-season-archive/4-now-press-release/    Gallery Hours: 11 am - 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday 526 West 26th Street, Suite 209, New York, New York 10001 646-336-8053 · 646-336-8054 (fax)

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is one of my favorite minimalist artists. My first encounter, strangely enough, was a rather offensive steel structure at the Tate Modern and I remember distinctly thinking how dangerous and difficult it must have been to get that particular mass and weight up to the fourth floor. I was unnerved by the prospect of the process alone. Also I was very hesitant to go near it looking as unstable as it does.  
 

Trip Hammer, 1988, photo courtesy of http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-serra-1923

  

The second time was Inside Out, 2013, Weatherproof steel, at the 21^st Street Gagosian. I was changed by walking through that installation sculpture. Again I thought about logistics at first, but there was a guard having a panic attack from standing at the center of the warped space and I could feel the manipulation of my own personal, comfortable space waxing and waning.   It was incredible.  Beautiful.  Indescribably intelligent.   As a painter, “manipulating the viewer” became a really important concept to how I viewed and made art.  Like all natural wonders, Inside Out made me feel insignificant. 

Image courtesy of Hyperallergic, http://hyperallergic.com/92340/mr-big-stuff-richard-serra-piles-it-on/

Richard Serra’s drawings, Vertical and Horizontal Reversals, at David Zwirner were just as incredible.  The black pigment spread thick like an exotic butter on raw whitepaper had my painting sensibilities enraptured. 

Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/

Richard Serra: Equal at David Zwirner was just as incredible to me.  Like childhood blocks, stacked high only to be knocked down in a powerful swoop, giving the player confidence and building the ego, these blocks are stacked but reverse the power lesson.   These blocks cannot easily be knocked down.  They are massive, weigh tons, and impress the viewer with the wonder of those ideas.  Like natural wonders, the blocks effectively reduce the viewer to insignificance in the greater universe.

I do believe that Jerry Saltz put it best in his three sentence review.

Photo: Richard Serra: Equal, David Zwirner, New York, 2015 Photo by Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London Artwork ? 2015 Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Richard Serra: "Equal"
David Zwirner
537 W. 20th St., through July 24

“By now it's not unusual when confronting one of Richard Serra's gigantic, metrically menacing, magnetically mighty curving steel sculptures, which are simultaneously architectonic and geological, to walk all around its meandering curves, maybe spot lovers kissing in the center of one, look at it in utter awe, yawn, and say, "Great!" This new show consists of four huge stacks of two cubic slabs, one atop another, and find Serra's mastery of material, mass, gravity, density, and an almost uncanny not-thereness now joined by ideas of the empty spaces between these shapes of steel and the tremendous forces acting upon them — but nevertheless being empty presences, interstices that you can look into and know in your body. This is his best show in more than 15 years of great shows, and it resounds with a complexity and cosmic instability not seen in solitary objects since Giorgio Morandi's miraculous vibrating arrangements.” - Jerry Saltz

Richard Serra is at David Swirner until July 24 but if you’re like me, don’t just go once!

For more information go to: http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/richard-serra-vertical-and-horizontal-reversals-2/

Run, don't walk...

..To Kathleen Bennett Bastis' sculpture show, still up in the gallery through April 25th!

Opening Reception: April 2, 6-8pm KATHLEEN BENNETT BASTIS PERMUTATIONS   Scattered Geometry, Tobacco hooks, metal, cord, nylon screen, 48 x 48 x 2", 2014 MARCH 31 - APRIL 25 "I am inspired by the distinctive character, energy and form found in the fragments of discarded, washed up, broken or otherwise overlooked materials which I salvage from the street, river bank and scrap yards. Their unique shape, texture and hue guide my creative process as I reinterpret the history of this detritus and construct a contemporary visual narrative." ­Permutations is Kathleen Bennett Bastis' first solo exhibition at First Street Gallery from March 31 to April 25, 2015. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 2nd, 6-8pm. To view more of her work, please visit our website.

 Gallery Hours: 11 am - 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday

 

Gallery Closed Friday, April 3

526 West 26th Street, Suite 209, New York, New York 10001

646-336-8053 · 646-336-8054 (fax)

2013 MFA National Competition

FIRST STREET GALLERY presents our 2013 MFA NATIONAL COMPETITION, the third in a series of annual exhibitions open exclusively to current MFA students throughout the United States. Juried by PHONG BUI -- critic, artist, teacher, independent curator and co-founder, editor and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail. This exciting exhibition contains a diverse range of styles and execution; it includes paintings, drawings, photographs, mixed media and sculptural constructions from 20 artists. ARTISTS: Kathy Akey, Laurie D. D'Alessandro, Jenny De Laughter, Sarah Dineen, Lindsey Jane Dunnagan, Erin Elizabeth, Nick Foster, Elisa Gabor, Crystal Gregory, Yunsung Jang, Ryota Kajita, Edmund J. Merricle II, Nicolai Nickson, Paula Abreu Pita, Evie Woltil Richner, Harry William Sidebotham II, Polixeni Theodorou, Stephanie D. Wallace, Jaclyn Wright and Heui Tae Yoon.

*Summer Hours: Begin July 18, Mon-Fri (11 -6)  

  

  

526 West 26 Street, Suite 209, New York, NY 10001

646-336-8053 · 646-336-8054 (fax) 

     

 First Street Gallery is located in the heart of Chelsea, NYC between 10th & 11th Avenues.

 [Nearest Subways: C,E,R,1,F,V to 23rd St. - crosstown bus to 10th Ave.

 Nearest Buses:  9th Avenue (#11), 8th Avenue (#10)