Michael Kohn Gallery is excited to propose a presentation of its collective of emerging and established artists. This showcase highlights a diverse employment of materials, relationship to subject matter, and skillful ideological expressions.
Heidi Hahn’s monumental portraits of women investigate bodily autonomy and interiority. Similarly, William Brickel’s emotionally distant male figures wrap around each other in a double helix of exaggerated forms borne of painterly restraint. Jinbin Chen’s delicate color palettes create environments which traverse a terrain of liminal gender. In contrast, Li Hei Di’s otherworldly canvases capture the transient elements of sexual impulse.
Siji Krishnan’s meticulously layered rice paper paintings explode the boundaries of material possibility with playful renderings of memory and belonging related to her upbringing in Southern India. Hadi Alijani’s fantastical works synthesize Persian iconography through an ironic, quotidian lens. In relation, Ilana Savdie’s electrifying, hot-colored surreal compositions question interstitialities of migration, foreignness, and familiarity.
Rosa Loy’s casein compositions strike a balance between the unheimlich and the humorous. Kate Barbee’s paintings combine impermanence with a Cubist sensibility where her subjects pull away from the constraints of figuration and park themselves firmly in mesmerizing abstraction. Nir Hod’s chromed, reflective canvases collapse distinctions between viewers’ expectations and the reality of the painting surface.
Beyond painting, Chiffon Thomas’s figurative assemblages interpret feelings of nostalgia, metamorphosis, and decay through his lens as a trans and queer artist raised within a strong religious environment. Alicia Adamerovich’s union of carpentry and surrealism fearlessly explore a subconscious landscape filled with radiant orbs and spiraling appendages.
Rounding out the presentation, Faris Heizer incorporates corporeal gesture, light, and perspective to narrate stories embedded in domesticity. Concerned with the limits of representation, Shiwen Wang shores themes of genesis and catastrophe in her insistently textural and ambiguously formed paintings.
The Armory Show would be the ideal setting to present the works of these masterful artists in a wider conversation with their peers and predecessors.
