Opening June 24, 2023, is Latent Constructions, a solo exhibition of works by Paho Mann, presented by Galleri Urbane. The show will consist of 8 digitally constructed still-life prints made with 3D scanning software and photographs. Using this state-of-the-art technology, Mann creates abstract images of 19th and 20th-century cameras and flowers as a metaphor for the constant transition of photographic and imaging technology. The exhibition collapses the boundaries between perceptions into a single experience.
Color is the dope, Aron Barath
Galleri Urbane welcomes Hungarian painter Aron Barath for his first solo exhibition in the United States. Color is the dope is a chromatic experience featuring canvases of bold, gossamer strokes of paint. Following his inclusion in the gallery's 2021 group summer show, RIPE, and a list of presentations across Europe, Barath introduces a broader array of hues in his ongoing investigation of color for this exhibition.
"Gesture painting is the way through which I can make my thoughts and feelings visible the most freely, spontaneously, without any compromises. It is a very inner energy that bursts out of me at the given moment," Barath says of his generative, abstract style.
Developing from a more limited color palette, in this show, Barath utilizes both muted and vibrant colors that splash and streak across canvases. Black, white, and opaque colors filter to the paintings' foreground to materialize colors of light. He combines contrasting hues upon the canvases: some radiate strongly while others cast colors more quietly. The pigments simultaneously display as transparent and impasto — a sublimity crafted by the Budapest-based painter.
Laying his canvases on the floor, Barath uses colors freely, painting with various materials and tools. Tested and mixed himself are water-based paints which allow his multiple layers to all easily be perceived at once. He uses a variety of brushes, brooms, sponges, and sprayers of different shapes and sizes alongside his handmade tools.
Barath chooses to explore the essence of traces of light, substance, and color in his work, absent from contemporary trends of communication. The selected paintings in the exhibition are studies of light and color through a series of intuitively completed steps. A euphoric kind of action takes place in Barath's studio as he paints interpretively and sometimes dances around his canvases.
Viewers of Color is the dope are transported into Barath's tranquil, psychedelic scene. "A good abstract painting primarily gives an experience," he says.
buff, Sam Mack
Galleri Urbane welcomes back sculptor and ceramicist Sam Mack for their second solo show with the gallery, buff. This follows their inclusion in the gallery’s 2020 summer collective and their 2019 solo exhibition, Pass.
Entitled buff, the show references the word’s numerous definitions, including the name of clay forms with a tan, sandy color (stoneware), a person’s muscular build, and the physical practice of maintaining a car’s body.
“buff describes an investment based on reductive definitions that name an arbitrary point in the process which is intended to yield one final expected outcome rather than the full spectrum of what is possible from that material and the myriad of practices,” Mack writes in a statement for the show, referencing the levels a ceramic piece must go through to pass as buff.
Traditionally non-functional beyond their original use, the artist grants permanence to familiar vessels such as Big Gulps and coffee cups by making them into stoneware. The sculpted containers are adorned with objects of everyday life, including queer and, specifically, transgender iconography. While not figurative nor literally representative of any one individual, these still-life objects of transness allow the viewer's body to become the body in relation to these objects.
The viewer's proximity and relationship to the work is important as they bring experiences of all forms, abilities, and identities, “which are valid and valued beyond state-constructed expectations,” Mack stated. The artist solidifies existence in this collection of stoneware artifacts of transgender life and references a grammar and history of trans gay men and masculinities broadly under-considered to this day.
Limbo Group Exhibition at Oak Cliff Assembly
Limbo, a group show curated by Simon Okoro and Tobias Jacob, will be held on Nov 12. The exhibition features Dallas-based artists working in photography, painting, and interactive sculpture. Limbo bridges mediums and alters traditional displays, bringing the show into a disorienting realm.
I Pick Up My Life, Tammie Rubin
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Austin-based artist Tammie Rubin for her debut solo show with the gallery, I Pick up My Life. She presents an exhibition surrounding Black Americans' metaphysical, physical, and spiritual relocation. Following her inclusion in the gallery's 2020 winter group exhibition, Rubin brings together family images, coded symbols, and historical maps to visually contextualize The Great Migration, referencing the first line of One-Way Ticket by Langston Hughs in the show’s title.
Her conical porcelain sculptures from the Always & Forever (forever, ever) series, shown at Untitled Miami 2021, are simple at first glance: caution cones, snow cone cups, and funnels. However, the blue and white stippled objects reference hoods worn by groups such as the Catholic Brotherhood of the Nazarenes, Ku Klux Klan, cultural images of wizards and witches, dunce caps, various African headdresses and Mardi Gras festival costumes. "It's this idea of codifying power," she says of conical hoods and the capirote—both "foreboding and absurd." Pulling pageantry used to denote power and intelligence to ignominy, she transforms the function of ceramics in the contemporary art space by placing migratory maps and visual data upon their surfaces.
Seemingly arbitrary geometric shapes within a mural are symbols said to be used in Underground Railroad quilts to communicate messages to enslaved individuals. This recreation of Monkey Wrench, North Star, Shoofly, her recent 2022 public project in Austin, TX, include painted motifs which were used to call to gather people and prepare, show the allyship found in a location, and with the North Star remind the people of the path to freedom.
Recalling her 2022 installation at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, Harmony, Comfort, Convenience, Round 53: The Curious Case of Critical Race…Theory?, Rubin fills a confined space with stake flags and lines a broad wall with collaged prayer fans—typically found in churches of the south to commemorate lives. In this exhibition, she repeatedly urges the viewer to acknowledge past and present systems, their implications, and mass movements in pursuit of freedom.
A collection of various media, Rubin's components weave together a range of associations, intertwining history and storytelling, redefining the use of an object and underscoring the magnitude of its being multifunctional. The inherited symbolism in these diverse forms and implied meanings encourage a range of emotions. I Pick Up My Life is an ethnographic experience of Black Americans and a migration story that spans centuries.
Proto Grove, Michelle Wasson
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Chicago-based artist Michelle Wasson for her debut solo show Proto Grove. Since her inclusion in the gallery’s 2021 summer group exhibition, RIPE, Wasson has migrated into a lighter and breathier environment with this new body of work.
By blending the genres of still life and landscape painting, Wasson transports us on a journey from the modest tabletop into an atmospheric Beyond. She celebrates the practice of painting often presenting an artist’s palette in the foreground, referencing the potential of art to transform us. Layering rich harmonious color while working simultaneously on variations, Wasson explores process as she builds history into her canvases.
Bosque, 2022, reminiscent of her past work, contains a figurative tree like silhouette that Wasson echoes throughout the exhibition. Golden, sienna, and amber hues lay against a seductively dark background. Another painting, Spirito Rosso, 2021, captures the transition from Wasson’s darker paintings into the more colorful domain of Proto Grove. With deep crimsons and violet accents, she creates an environment of dream-like depth providing various entry points for the viewer.
Anointing the show is a brilliant painting For Hermes from 2022. Pale mauves, purples, and accents of flaxen petals build to form a winged vase of flowers, reminiscent of the namesake Greek god’s winged sandals. This piece is one of several variations of a sculptural silhouette that playfully nods to art history.
Wasson takes the viewer on an emotional journey with these generative creations and their gossamer of colors upon deep backdrops, at times, unveiling human nature and its inherent tensions. In a glowing expanse, Proto Grove’s narrative is one of nature’s fertility--providing a hopeful gesture of light that celebrates the need for relentless recreation from destruction.
Intersections
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce our 7th annual group show, Intersections, an exhibition featuring the work of Gail Peter Borden, Peter Frederiksen, Chase Barney and Benjamin Terry, and welcoming Amelia Briggs, Karen Navarro for the first time. This show is composed of recent works from the artists which examine intersections of culture and identity along with themes of convergent artistic elements and mediums.
Artist Benjamin Terry returns with his effervescent geometric paintings, which fit together like jigsaw puzzles. To exude his 80’s attitude in style, Terry utilizes punches of colors, splatters of paint, and bold gradients. In a stylistic hangover from his previous work, he layers wood pieces over paper, divulging from entirely wood works. The pieces are simple at first glance but reveal themselves as carefully planned abstracted scenes. Contrasting with a sleek style are artist and architect Gail Peter Borden’s signature color blocked resin cast acrylic panels. With vibrant monochromatic and complementary colors, the works can be tessellated together in a multitude of variations and explore illusions of depth through color.
Gallery artist Peter Frederiksen contributes his bold cartoon-like embroidery work on linen, featuring What is it (2022). Appropriating his traditionally feminine medium into soft sculptures, Frederiksen encourages interpretations of his abstract, humorous works by inserting messages into his pieces.
Highlights from new artists to the gallery include Chase Barney, exhibiting ceramic work that “blends queer joy and religious melancholy.” His pieces are scenes of embraced animals and euphemistic images, such as in Mountain Meadow (2021). Filled with symbolic contradictions, Barney raises questions of identity in his ambitious work. Stylized relief scenes use exaggerated and understated scales, relying on atmosphere created through iconography. Artist Karen Navarro continues the exploration of identity in deconstructed portraits of immigrants and individuals victimized by colonialism. The Argentinian-born artist, in her pursuit to understand selfhood in modern society, breaks the boundaries of traditional portraiture.
Reminiscent of childlike wonder and imagination, Nashville-based multidisciplinary artist Amelia Briggs creates animated, three-dimensional pieces. Pollyanna (2022), composed of panel, reclaimed fibers, latex, and oil, manipulates materials to create a puffy figure with meandering snake-like lines of gradient colors swirling out from the center. Her wonderland-like figures appear to float in space, further challenging the understood reality they exist in.
Ensemble pieces fusing into a larger narrative, Intersections is fortunate to create a larger story of power in and through harmonious dichotomies. This show reveals layers of individuality and questions of elements and materials, challenging tradition. This colorful collection of artists brings forth various techniques and concepts to present Galleri Urbane’s identity.
The Shape of Color, Rachel Hellmann
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Indiana artist Rachel Hellmann for a solo show, The Shape of Color, featuring fluorescent-painted relief sculptures, paintings, and an analogous mural. This body of work echoes her recent paintings and installation at the Rockwell Museum (Rockwell, NY), Leaning Toward the Sun, which will be up through March 2023. These pieces provoke ephemeral conversations of light and assumed dimensionality between various mediums.
Hellmann employs rare bioluminescent colors found in the natural world with the exactitude of architectural forms in her sculptures. The contradictory influences contest conventional understandings of form and color and therefore “choreograph relationships between and among the pieces,” Hellmann said of this new body of work.
Paintings on paper directly correlate to the sculptures, stretching Hellmann’s examination of color into the tangible. Thoughtfully planned and redrawn, she will show paintings up to 52 x 52 in, her largest works on paper yet. These studies on paper deceive dimensions in the absence of physical depth.
Using poplar wood and MDF, the artist bends individual segments into architectural forms, which she then joins with adhesives. Following her highly intuitive process, Hellmann paints “shapes of color.” Floating with a luminescent halo, the sculptures fold away from the wall. Contrasting hues exhibit subtle illusions of indiscernible depth.
Parallel Gleam (2022) is a shaped painting of white and highly-pigmented chartreuse acrylic on wood with a perceived luminescence from behind, made from reflective paint—without any use of light. The colors quietly perform beyond physical shape, utilizing shadows and filtering light into a moment.
In her pursuit to blur the line between painting and sculpture, Hellmann works intuitively, finding a flow between her agents. This process creates movement in and between the mind-bending pieces.
Hellmann has been an artist at Galleri Urbane since 2016 and recently showed Dimensions in Space at Saenger Galeria in Mexico City. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Corning Museum of Glass, March 15-17.
Naked Light, Anna Kunz
Galleri Urbane is delighted to welcome back Chicago artist Anna Kunz for her highly anticipated solo show, Naked Light. Completed in 2022, this series of paintings asks viewers to experience the warmth of light, represented by color, as a purveyor of society. These paintings galvanize conversation between both viewers and color upon canvas while confronting the emptiness and lack of connection from physical distancing.
Kunz’s works are in conversation with one another, flowing variously embodied subjectivities through color. “…the edges of each form and color bleed into each other, so there are no real contained boundaries,” she says of her work, mirroring her pursuit of creating ephemeral spaces that disrupt contemporary social and material boundaries.
Kunz utilizes acrylic on canvas and oil on linen for Naked Light as mediums to express kinship and community, addressing solitary existence. Dry and water-soaked strokes create an amalgamation of feelings in each painting. Using planks to traverse the canvases splayed on the floor, she slowly layers one color of paint at a time to the entire body of work. She creates a dialogue between heavily coated, bold hues of paint with lighter layers that are less opaque. No section of a canvas appears to be touched only once — layering thought and feeling.
Upward Slope (2022) is a work of tessellated panels focused on Kunz’s pursuit of physical cohesion to adjoin unlike perspectives. The colors are performative for the viewer, displaying opportunity for various impressions from the help of light’s mutability.
Kunz’s work sits alongside that of artists using color to speak for tangible existence. It’s a contemporary collection that interweaves various communications between the physicality of rhythm found in the paint upon the canvas and choreography of growing solidarity in our muted society.
For the UT Southwestern Medical Center Clements Collection, Kunz further investigated performance of color in a commissioned series of seven panels. Living beyond the canvas, Kunz worked with Nina Sarin Arias on a ready-to-wear collection shown at New York Fashion Week A/W 2022.
Kunz has been an artist at Galleri Urbane since 2016 and is newly represented by Alex Berrgruen, NY.