ArtMuse

Where mark making is both the subject and the object of a pictorial practice. In the Swiss artist new show “pontes and arbores” at .mcenery.gallery her paintings utilize photographic, printing and painting techniques to an energetic and playful effect.
“In her ongoing practice, Pia Fries creates expansive abstract works that blend oil painting techniques with screen-printing. Her newest compositions utilize an intricate mixed-media approach, integrating images of wood and accumulated paint from her palette screen-printed directly onto wood panels. The works are inherently self-referential in their materiality and content.

The usage of photography and screen printing embedded in the work is an essential component of the paintings. Pia Fries has, in many respects, developed a unique visual alphabet, the meaning of which is only revealed through the interplay of the individual elements.

Pia Fries’ material research seeks an “aspiration that clearly exceeds mere reproduction,” offering a contrast to our oversaturated world of digital images. This methodical approach to artmaking is not simply about depicting an image, but about engaging with the physical substance of the mediums themselves.”

A rare opportunity to view “The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein” at Its a dynamic grouping of works on offer from the private collection, on view at the gallery’s location at 525 West 19th Street in New York.
“The selection reflects the refined eye and distinctive taste that the couple honed over more than six decades of collecting, and includes works by Romare Bearden, Joan Brown, Roger Brown, Joe Coleman, Jean Dubuffet, Eric Fischl, Audrey Flack, David Gilhooly, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, Peter Saul,
Bob Thompson, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, Tom Wesselmann, and Joseph Yoakum; along with a
selection of additional works.
Highlights from the presentation include a double portrait by Alice Neel of artist Red Grooms and his wife and collaborator Mimi Gross from 1967; Fairfield Porter’s significant 1966 work, one of
his largest paintings, which debuted in his 1967 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York; Alex Katz’s monumentally scaled portrait of his wife Ada, a 1975 self-portrait by San Francisco painter Joan Brown that featured on the cover of the catalogue for her 2022–2023
retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; a late Romare Bearden collage, and Andy Warhol’s silk-screened pastiche Judy Garland (1979); among
other important works.” It’s a wonderful opportunity to see some of the best works by the various artists in the collection.

We are immediately drawn to the saturated, emotive colors that radiate across all works both monumental and miniature and so we are pulled in to enter the imaginary world created by the influential contemporary painter in her new expansive exhibition at
“Yuskavage has developed a highly
original approach to figuration that continues to expand the possibilities of painting and its role within contemporary art. Her simultaneously assertive and vulnerable, exhibitionist and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. Deploying color as a character, Yuskavage’s paintings are realms of artifice and imagination in which realistic and abstract elements coexist.
The exhibition marks a significant development in Yuskavage’s practice while synthesizing the themes that have shaped her oeuvre since the beginning. Although many of the paintings and drawings appear to unfold within a studio setting, they are more accurately located in the mind of the artist, becoming imaginative gatherings where time warps and folds back on itself, collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries….Nothing is exactly what it seems; instead, the paintings sustain a
state of constant vacillation. This is something painting as a medium can do, but it is specifically what Yuskavage’s paintings do.”

Good morning from the kids running in the waves, the flowers in the vase, the landscapes, the fruit and other favorite subjects of Impressionist and post-impressionist artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh but reimagined and recomposed of brushstrokes by the always imaginative artist for his new solo show simply titled “Brushstrokes” at
“Vik Muniz is globally renowned for his series recreating popular and art historical imagery using unorthodox source materials—chocolate, sugar, scraps of paper, and junk, among a range of unexpected media. His practice engages the act of looking as a site of physical and symbolic experience, where the presumed nature of an artwork can be thrillingly destabilized. In Brushstrokes, Muniz presents a vibrant homage to the pictorial language of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. The works in this series are created from distinct strokes of paint that are photographed, cut out, and arranged into compositions after artists such as Paul Cézanne, Joaquín Sorolla, Vincent van Gogh, and Edouard Vuillard. These artists proposed new ways of seeing the world, realized through sensorial expressions of color, medium, and light. Drawing on this history, Muniz embraces the ambiguities of material (re)creation as a source of visual experimentation and discovery.”