Persistence
of Painting
Curated by Douglas Lederman and Peter Franck
With works by Rachel Budde, Noah Landfield, Karen Seapker and Jeremy Wagner
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 19th, 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition: May 19 to June 12, 2010
Clockwise from top left: Karen Seapker, Jeremy Wagner, Noah Landfield, Rachel Budde
Sloan Fine Art is pleased to exhibit Persistence of Painting, a showcase curated by Douglas Lederman and Peter Franck, presenting four artists - Jeremy Wagner, Karen Seapker, Noah Landfield and Rachel Budde - whose works exemplify the centrality of eye/hand coordination in painting and whose individual techniques of representation reinforce the vibrancy of the medium and its relevancy to contemporary art.
Curators Douglas Lederman and Peter Franck met while both were pursuing their undergraduate degrees at Columbia and taking art and architectural history courses. Lederman went on to a career as a lawyer and Franck as an architect and both have remained active in the arts. Lederman is an enthusiastic collector and private dealer who donates his time working pro-bono for young artists, galleries and not for profits. Franck is a collector and board member and curator at The Fields Sculpture Park at ArtOmi. Throughout their decades long friendship, Lederman and Franck have pursued a spirited dialog about art and artists, combing graduate exhibitions, galleries and museums for inspiration and new finds. This exhibition is the culmination of just one aspect of that conversation - their continued passion for, and commitment to, the Persistence of Painting.
With this exhibition, Lederman and Franck highlight the skill, dedication and hands-on approach of four young artists (all of whom are products of the Hunter MFA program), along with their individuality, innate creativity and ability to communicate with a contemporary audience. With a provocative mix of abstract and representational elements and references ranging from Impressionism and Expressionism to Surrealism, Cubism, Color Field and Pop Art, the selected works are all rooted in art history, yet vibrantly connected to the moment through references to film, digital photographic manipulation and global communication. Click here to read curators' statement. Curator and artist resumes available on request.
Initially, and from a distance, it is easy to mistake Jeremy Wagner’s work for representational realism. But on closer inspection, layers of opacity and patches of raw steel “canvas” and rust reveal pure geometric forms and fields of color. A technically masterful painter, with his gritty urban imagery, unique materials and knowledge of, and teasing references to, art history, Wagner’s work is truly contemporary and pertinent. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
With swirling vortexes and sweeping marks, Karen Seapker denotes movement, the passage of time and the bursting of emotion with extraordinary skill and originality. Her figurative studies refer to prior styles of painting, yet their juxtaposition with near abstract/color-field backgrounds is strikingly contemporary - and her backgrounds are anything but static in the way that color-field canvases and much abstract art can be. Seapker currently resides in Pittsburgh.
Noah Landfield’s impressionistic overlays of metropolitan architectural renderings express the tension between manmade urban structures and the forces of nature and the ways in which they manage to coexist. The unsettling nature of these temporal questions give a strong contemporary edge to Landfield’s work, as does his playing with visual perception in the near-photographic quality of his depiction of cities, which are actually painted in a masterfully pointillist manner. Landfield lives and works in Brooklyn.
Rachel Budde, who studied miniature painting in India, combines fine brush strokes and intimate details with contemporary socio-economic, psychological, cosmological and gender themes, along with unsettling and occasionally morbid imagery, endowing her work (in both her small and large-scale paintings) with a unique visceral impact. She works predominantly in gouache on paper, with the additions of ink and metal leaf, again referring back to the tradition of Indian illustration, while communicating a strong and unquestionably contemporary sensibility. Budde lives and works in Brooklyn.
