Celebrating at the Bedford Playhouse
LITTLEJOHN CONTEMPORARY
Is very pleased to present a show of artworks at the
BEDFORD PLAYHOUSE
January & February 2020
Reception Thursday, January 16th, 6:30 - 8:30
A New Year celebratory showing of works by:
Kate Breakey, Annette Davidek, David Kroll, Lily Prince,
Anne Siems, Christopher Smith, Maggie Taylor
Bedford Playhouse - Home of the Clive Davis Arts Center
633 Old Post Road, Bedford, New York
LILY PRINCE
Recurring Waves of Arrival
Paintings
March 8 – April 28, 2018
Lago di Como 1, 2017, 55x64, Watercolor and gouache on paper
Lily Prince - Recurring Waves of Arrival – Paintings. The exhibit, Recurring Waves of Arrival, will run from March 8 through April 28, 2018. The exhibition title, Recurring Waves of Arrival, is taken from a line in a John Ashbery poem.
Lily Prince, whose process includes oil pastel drawings and watercolor and gouache paintings, has an extensive exhibition and publication record. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally and has had her work included in numerous publications and commissions. The paintings in this exhibition, Prince’s first with the gallery, are all inspired by her repeated travels to Italy, where she returns to draw frequently. Her San Giovanni d’Asso series began in 2013 when she was staying for an extended time in a tiny Tuscan village, after completing an artist residency in southern Italy on the Adriatic Sea.
Lily Prince considers herself an explorer, studying the atmosphere of diverse spaces. Returning repeatedly to specific views, she combines illusionistic space with the interpretive mark-making inherent in the abstract ordering of the chaos of nature. While Prince’s paintings are rooted in her interpretation of one or two particular places, they combine the memory of past spaces with future aspiration. Prince’s initially observational works portray the pulsating rhythms and fecundity of both NY’s Hudson River Valley and Tuscany’s Crete Senesi. Undulating hills, rippling fertile fields, echoing distant mountains and shifting skies, have a sense of movement that knock the viewer slightly off-balance. Prince’s watercolor and gouache paintings, which range in scale from small to quite large, give the viewer the sense of flying through them, hovering, as the earth shifts in subtle twists and turns. These paintings represent Prince’s visceral connection to nature, to the energy emanating from an evocative terrain, and her constant longing to return to it anew, like recurring waves of arrival.
ANNE SIEMS
Rabbit Medicine, acrylic on prepared wood panel, 48x48
WE ARE ONE
Recent Paintings
January 17 – March 3, 2018
In this body of work I have moved back to a more clearly representational narrative. There continues to be important abstract elements (loops, dots, circles, and hazy backgrounds) but the interplay is now greater between those and the more fully rendered - yet transparent - animals’ and children’s bodies.
Mine is an ongoing inquiry and desire to transmit a sense of energy, a state of being and feeling into my paintings. When one inquiry feels resolved I move on, often revisiting places in my older work and finding new ways to interact with it.
‘We Are One’ follows the longing of my heart and the knowledge of my mind about the interconnected web of all life on earth. The deeper we come into contact with this knowledge-- not only abstractly, but with visceral experiencing-- the more urgent become the actions we need to take to protect that Oneness.
KATE BREAKEY
COPSES AND TREES AND TUMBLEWEEDS
Hand-colored photographs
October 18-January 13, 2018
New York, NY (CHELSEA) - Littlejohn Contemporary is pleased to present a one-person
exhibition of hand-colored archival digital photographs, “Copses and Trees and Tumbleweeds”, by Kate Breakey. The exhibit will run from October 18 through December 2, 2017.
Kate Breakey is an internationally recognized artist whose photographic processes include hand-colored archival digital photographs, goldleaf prints on glass called orotones, and photograms on paper. The images in the current show, comprised of copses, trees, tumbleweeds, and landscapes -- selected from the artist’s prodigious travels to various parts of the world – are archival digital photographic prints lightly hand-colored with pencil, pastel or oil paint which amplifies the otherworldly appearance of her subjects.
Valerie Hammond - I stole them from a Bee
Valerie Hammond - I stole them from a Bee
September 5 - October 14, 2017
Opening Reception Thursday, September 14, 6-8pm
Littlejohn Contemporary is pleased to present an exhibition of recent drawings and sculpture by New York artist Valerie Hammond. The show takes its title from the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem:
I stole them from a Bee—
Because—Thee—
Sweet plea—
He pardoned me!
Though what exactly was stolen from the bee is uncertain, one might surmise it was a bouquet of sweet-smelling flowers; the bee, momentarily ungrounded, must renew its search for another bloom. The sensations provided by this brief reverie – the thief’s hesitation, the bee’s startled buzz, the still warmth of perfumed air – are those of the same wonderment and contemplative introspection that permeate Hammond’s work. Interestingly, she almost chose for her title “A dim capacity for wings,” a line from another Dickinson poem in which the narrator, a new butterfly, emerges from her chrysalis. In the first poem, one is witness to a bee’s staggered flight; in the other, the notion of flight is experienced in the first person. This shift in perspective is at the crux of Hammond’s work; transformation occurs in the slowed perception of a passing moment, when the reverberation of nature echoes in the soul.
Summer Group Show
Featuring work by SARAH HINCKLEY, ANNE SIEMS, ROBERT MARCHESSAULT, ANNETTE DAVIDEK, LILY PRINCE, NATHANIEL GALKA, MAYME KRATZ, KATE BREAKEY, VALERIE HAMMOND, DAVID KROLL
MAYME KRATZ “Dust to Dust”
May 3 – June 17, 2017
Mayme Kratz is a mixed-media artist best known for creating art inspired from the natural life of the desert that surrounds her Phoenix, Arizona home and studio. A passionate wanderer and garden lover, Mayme Kratz creates sculptures using found organic fragments, desert ephemera and resin. Foraging the landscape on hikes through the high deserts of the American Southwest or in her own backyard, she collects seeds, flower pods, bones, wings, vertebrae, shells, as well as birds’ nests, twigs and branches--all dried and preserved in the harsh desert environment.
With great reverence for the natural world, Kratz creates cast resin pieces of fragile beauty locked in fluid translucent resin. The artist embeds her found objects, sometimes spliced or broken apart and arranged in precise patterns, in luminous, cast-resin wall panels and vessels. Kratz sands and grinds the surface of her panels until the interior structure of her gathered materials gradually emerge as abstract lines, circles, and spirals that reveal a kinship to the vastness of the ocean or night sky. Often cyclical in composition, her hauntingly beautiful sculptural and two-dimensional resin works reflect themes of beauty, memory and longing.
GROUP SHOW
Wednesday March 23-Saturday April 22
Featuring work by:
Richard Misrach, Kate Breakey, Mayme Kratz, Sarah Hinckley, Lily Prince, David Kroll, & Valerie Hammond
SARAH HINCKLEY
Looking For Some Grace
Paintings & Watercolors
February 8 - March 11, 2017
January 2017 exhibit thru February 4th
Our January exhibition in our new space
(same building, same floor, one door away from before!):
Kate Breakey, Laurie Hogin, Julie Heffernan, Valerie Hammond,
David Kroll, and Sarah Hinckley.
Left to Right: Kate Breakey hand-colored photographs; Laurie Hogin painting; Julie Heffernan painting from 1993; Valerie Hammond relief print on handmade paper.
We will be participating in ART on PAPER – Pier 36, 299 South Street, NYC
Anne Appleby
Hilary Brace
Kate Breakey
Valerie Hammond
Sarah Hinckley
Laurie Hogin
Lily Prince
Anne Siems
Melinda Stickney-Gibson
Art on Paper VIP Preview:
Thursday, March 2 | 6:00PM to 10:00PM
Regular Fair Hours:
Friday, March 3 | 11:00AM to 7:00PM
Saturday, March 4 | 11:00AM to 7:00PM
Sunday, March 5 | 12:00PM to 6:00PM
CONTACT US FOR A COMPLIMENTARY 1-DAY PASS
on view during the holidays 2016:
A group exhibition including work by:
Phyllis BRAMSON, Susan ENGLISH, Valerie HAMMOND, Sarah HINCKLEY, Mayme KRATZ, David KROLL, & Melinda STICKNEY-GIBSON
Phyllis Bramson Oct 11 – Nov 12, 2016
PHYLLIS BRAMSON: "My World...And Everywhere It Takes Me“, October 12 - November 12
In "My World…And Everywhere It Takes Me” Bramson reveals romantic and evocative depictions of her poetic internal world. The artist paints passionately and infuses her work with lighthearted arbitrariness and amusing anecdotes about love and affection in an often cold and hostile world. Her narratives are used as a repository for feelings which often collide and intermingle between notions of the personal, the decorative and, at the same time, propose a story but don’t tell an ending.
PHYLLIS BRAMSON - The Good Keeper of All Living Things, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 70x60
In her childhood home, Bramson was surrounded by collections and mishmashes of high and low. Kitsch was juxtaposed with assorted objects such as Asian female figurines, paintings, and Oriental wallpaper. The artist’s visual roots have been a continuous presence in her work, while also employing narration and inspiration from Chinese Pleasure Gardens as well as Indian miniatures, paintings by Fragonard, Boucher, and Henry Darger. Bramson engages in abstraction and collage combined with figuration, co-mingling folly with value-infused feelings about the human condition. Balancing delicately between the humorous and somewhat disturbing, her work offers a glimpse into the depictions of playful eccentric spaces and the "bawdy banal".
Phyllis Bramson is a recipient of three National Endowments, Senior Fulbright Scholar, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Grant, School of Art + Design at University of Illinois at Urbana “distinguished alumni award; “Distinguished Artist 2012” by the Union League Club of Chicago, and was selected as one of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awardees for 2014. Phyllis Bramson has been in over forty one-person exhibitions including: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, Boulder Art Museum, Boulder, Colorado, Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (mid-career survey), Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, New York, Philip Slein Gallery, St Louis, Missouri, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. She has been included in countless group exhibitions in museums around the United States and her work hangs in numerous private and public collections. In 2015-2017 Bramson has been exhibiting a traveling thirty-year survey at the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, Illinois, the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, and Herron Galleries at Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Bramson lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She is Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently advises graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bramson received her BFA from the University of Illinois and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bramson is currently represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, and Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, New York. This is her fifth solo exhibition with Littlejohn Contemporary.
LAURIE HOGIN
DAVID KROLL
DAVID KROLL - New Paintings, June 7 - July 9, 2016.
As written by Michael Upchurch of The Seattle Times, “… this Seattle-based artist’s work is a delightfully fanciful exercise in artifice. In his most recent work, Kroll repeatedly organizes his natural-world details into highly mannered compositions that keep the viewer continually off-balance. Within the scope of a single painting, the subtlety with which his imagery seems to slip from still-life intimacies to rolling mountain landscape and sublime sky expanses spurs the viewer to think and see on two entirely different scales simultaneously – and sometimes even three or four, when there’s a painted vase in the picture. In short, there are world within worlds here, and the interaction between them is both playful and illuminating”.
David Kroll himself adds: “My intentions explore the paradoxical relationship between human culture and the natural world. … It is not my intention to create an accurate depiction of a particular creature or habitat, but to create an invented, imaginary moment touching upon man’s complicated, perplexing relationship with nature.”
ANNE SIEMS
ANNE SIEMS
April 2016 Anne Siems "Young Magician"
Stickney-Gibson and Kate Breakey
Two new shows coming up at our New York gallery:
MELINDA STICKNEY-GIBSON and KATE BREAKEY
MELINDA STICKNEY-GIBSON
inside / outside
March 17 – April 23, 2016
Reception: Thursday, March 17, 6-8pm
“NO, KNOW (…still)”, 2015, oil on canvas, 42 x 48 inches
Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s new series of paintings continues her investigation into the nature of paint and painterly gesture. Neither completely abstract nor representational, her paintings reflect upon the natural world just outside the door of her Catskill Mountain home, as well as her more internal, personal narratives.
Stickney-Gibson greatly values the solitude and quiet of life in the Catskills. Her work is characterized by a diaristic, personal approach. Paintings with multi-layered surfaces begin with written marks; incorporating fragments of writing from her own journals, favorite writing samples by others, and universal words such as “yes, “maybe”, “no?”, and “her”. These marks represent specific moments; each one has an intention which once fulfilled is checked off and covered over. The paintings have an underlying hidden narrative which is eventually erased when a final white top layer of paint covers the gesture. In this way Stickney-Gibson is sharing but still keeping her stories personal. Most evident in this work is the artist’s relationship and longtime love of the physical act of painting, and her visceral love of the paint itself. She states that “though not comfortable with being labeled an Abstract Expressionist, she is in fact abstractly expressing herself and that, for her, painting is a very physical activity.”
For Melinda Stickney Gibson, painting is like life – messy, full of accidents and underlain with semi-orderly structures that bend and disintegrate under pressure of real life action. Her lyrical paintings are not so much painted as allowed to evolve, growing by accretion over periods of weeks or months (or at times, even years), as loose brushstrokes are laid over looser grids, fields of color laid down to partially obscure sketchy marks, and traces of covered layers revealed by a subtle cut through the surface. The final compositions are full of evidence of the process that created them, yielding a subtle complexity that could never have been envisioned at the beginning. —Eleanor Heartney
This is Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s 6th solo exhibition with Littlejohn Contemporary. She has been exhibiting her work since the mid-1980’s. Originally from the Midwest, and currently based in Woodstock, NY, the artist has been living and working in New York for over 30 years. She has had over 25 one-person exhibitions, and has participated in numerous group shows throughout the country.
KATE BREAKEY
LAS SOMBRAS / The Shadows – Photograms
& GOLDEN STARDUST -- Orotones
March 17 – April 23, 2016
Reception: Thursday, March 17, 6-8pm
Las Sombras/The Shadows – photograms
Installation, dimensions variable
Golden Stardust – Reclining Nude
Orotone, glass with goldleaf, 13 x 19 inches
Kate Breakey’s Las Sombras/The Shadows are contact prints known as photograms or photogenic drawings. In these prints she has covered the photographic paper with a layer of translucent golden paint to tone them sepia, these works have a similar look of Victorian illustrations yet their sensibility is distinctly modern. Making pictures without a camera, like early nineteenth-century photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, Breakey also shares their affinity for recording the natural world in scientific detail as well as with artistic beauty. These shadows are full of light. Breakey’s luminous images of coyotes and whipsnakes, hopping mice and scorpions, are filled with her love of the American Southwest, where she lives, and the animals, plants, and insects that inhabit the land. In the way she poses the animals, Breakey’s coyotes and rabbits dance; her birds fly.
This is an art that entails both the primitive and something ethereal. In her text for her book Las Sombras/The Shadows the photographer says that she burns these “shadows” of animals and plants onto photographic paper “with light and with love.”
Also on view in this exhibition are the artist’s Orotones, her “Golden Stardust” series. Unlike the photograms, these works are photographs developed onto photosensitized glass upon which the artist burnishes a layer of 24K goldleaf. Photographs taken from many areas around the world where the artist has travelled, from Scotland to Australia to Italy and beyond, the artist’s keen eye finds magic in every landscape and every object she encounters.
This will be Kate Breakey’s first solo exhibition with Littlejohn Contemporary. Since 1980, her work has appeared in more than ninety, one-person exhibitions and more than fifty group exhibitions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, and France. A native of South Australia who has also lived and worked in Texas, Ms. Breakey now resides and photographs in the desert outside Tucson. The major archive of Breakey’s work — traditional photographs as well as photograms — is held by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcos. Las Sombras/The Shadows is the third Breakey book in the Wittliff’s Southwestern & Mexican Photography series.
Her books include Birds/Flowers published in 2002 by Eastland Books and Slowlight published by Etherton Gallery in 2012. Breakey has produced three substantial monographs in collaboration with The Wittliff Collections and the University of Texas Press, beginning with Small Deaths (2001), followed by Painted Light (2010) a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making, and Las Sombras/The Shadows (2012) which is comprised of many hundreds of images, from a bald eagle to tiny moths and flies. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is "brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things." "My art," she says, "is about connection to all living things on Earth.”
DAVID KROLL
The exquisite MONOGRAPH on DAVID KROLL’s work arrives next week in time for the holidays. Published by Marquand Books of Seattle, WA, this 112 page book features essays by James Yood and Linda Tesner and includes 72 color plates celebrating the life and work of David Kroll.
To reserve a copy please contact the gallery at info@littlejohncontemporary.com
New paintings by this gifted artist have also come in!
DAVID KROLL "Paintings", 112 pp + 72 color plates monograph, published by Marquand Books.
~ ~ UPCOMING ~ ~
LITTLEJOHN CONTEMPORARY — NEW YORK
January
Robert Marchessault – Paintings (trees!)
Alison Moritsugu – Paintings and Gouaches
March/April
Melinda Stickney-Gibson – Paintings
Kate Breakey – Orotones and Photograms
~ ~ UPCOMING ~ ~
LITTLEJOHN CONTEMPORARY — NEW CANAAN
January
Torrance York – Photography
February
Robert Marchessault – Paintings (trees!)
March
Alison Moritsugu – Paintings and Gouaches
April
Kate Breakey – Orotones and Photograms
Anne Siems – Paintings
May
David Kroll – Paintings
For additional information on gallery artists please call or write to
Jacquie@LittlejohnContemporary.com
203-451-5050