Philip Martin Gallery's Frieze New York 2020 on-line viewing room presents works by Holly COULIS, Katy COWAN, Kristy LUCK and Joanne PETIT-FRÈRE. These four artists work in painting, sculpture, and textiles.
Holly COULIS (b. 1968, lives Athens, GA) engages with the traditional genres of painting — still life, landscape and portraiture — as a framework for a complex exploration of the language of painting. Holly Coulis's paintings can be abstract, or operate as stages where life scenes unfold. A table, for example, creates an initial structure where simplified, geometric forms are arranged and interact. There is a sense of order in these scenes as though the fruits and dishes had been laid out by some external force. Through layers of paint, linear elements are created, giving the illusion of colorful stripes or energy fields around individual objects. These works feel familiar, but upend our sense of figure/ground, horizon-line, perspective, and scale.
Katy COWAN (b. 1982, lives Berkeley, CA) makes hand-cast, hand-painted aluminum works of rope constructions. These rope constructions are put together in the studio, and organized with an eye to abstraction, line, shape, color and energy. The rope constructions are burned out in the sand-casting process, leaving an aluminum cast wall frieze on which Cowan paints with oil paint, taking the process a step further. Cowan's body, her studio tools, and the events in her immediate environment serve as generative subject-matter for her artworks. These artworks investigate human experience and the traces left by such experience. They suggest that ideas and objects are both physical and metaphorical, and that an impression can take forms both indexically literal and expressively iconic.
Kristy LUCK (b. 1985, lives Los Angeles, CA) makes paintings that engage with the medium's tradition of depicting women in melancholic or revelatory states. Luck considers Modernism, its legacy and implications with regard to individual voice and transformation. Luck’s paintings point to mysterious significance and contemplation. The artist has said, “I am trying to find a visual language for personal melancholia and intuition; melancholia not as a pathology, but as an illuminating discourse with oneself, and intuition as subconscious pattern recognition. I’m interested in how these emotional experiences have been dismissed or devalued when associated with the ‘feminine mind.’”
Joanne PETIT-FRÈRE (b. 1987, lives New York, NY) addresses the human body as a site of beauty and adornment. Drawing on sources ranging from African Diaspora traditions, Old West movies, the photographs of Cindy Sherman and the history of Haiti, Petit-Frère makes labor intensive tapestries and sculptures that involve weaving by hand eight or more colors of synthetic hair. In the gallery, Petit-Frère’s work is realized as sculpture; however, it is often activated by performance. Petit-Frère enlists performance as a means by which to think about our own bodies, and those around us. In the midst of crisis, human touch and presence in society is increasingly charged, and Petit-Frère responds to this, and the underlying currents in societal dialogue.
During COVID-19, Philip Martin Gallery is open by appointment only. For further information and images please contact the gallery at +310-559-0100 or info@philipmartingallery.com.
Philip Martin Gallery
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
info@philipmartingallery.com
