JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY PRESS RELEASE Contact: Dina Muenzfeld [email protected] May 2012 Reductive May 15 through June 10, 2012 Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 6 - 8:30 pm The Jeffrey Leder Gallery is pleased to present Reductive, a curated exhibition including 16 visual artists, on view from May 15th through June 10th, 2012 on two floors of the historic brownstone located in the heart of Long Island City. Reductive bridges geometric abstraction, figurative painting and photography in contemporary art. Featuring both emerging and mid-career artists, the exhibition combines approaches to formal simplicity in various media and styles. The artwork selected is informed by reflections on color, scale and substance. Tranquil surfaces are intended to create a sense of intimacy, quiet sensualities the beholder can connect to. Sheer fields of color and open, iconic signs allow interaction between the art objects and the eye of the beholder. Nadege Morey’s Black Cross (2009) epitomizes the show, intending to “connect to the viewer using straight lines, basic shapes and symbols that most of us can relate to.” On the one hand, the exhibition features austere geometric compositions, a vocabulary commonly understood as Minimalism. Jason Hoelscher’s paintings for example are inspirited by classical geometry like the Golden Section as well as the his idea to create “a pictorial space that combines an abstraction of Renaissance depth with a representation of modernist flatness”. On the other hand, the majority of art on dislay overcomes a stylistical classification as Minimal. Reductive uses the Minimalist idea of art to speak to the viewer’s feelings. “No illusions. No allusions” is the request of minimalist artist Donald Judd to allow experiential experiences to connect the artwork with the beholder. Compositions seek out simplicity and reduction in order to eliminate any evocation or psychological reference. Symbolic language is evaded and the gaze directed on issues of color, scale and space in order to make each work as strong as the thoughts of the spectator. Claire McConaughy’s representational stills of women portrayed from the back were chosen for their formal organization and palette. Just as hard-edge geometry engages the eye through it’s arrangement of planes and colors, so do McConaughy’s still lifes call for introspection: “Each scene looks into itself and creates an inner life for the painting, therefore, the sitter’s identity and thoughts become the result of the viewer’s interpretation”. Stephen Celuch’s marine landscapes and dark interior scenes display a literal reduction of subject matter on a small canvas: “It is an excercise in mindfulness and awareness recalling the experiences without pondering them, making the work more about feeling than representation”. Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com 6/11 Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com 7/11 JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY In his Montauk series he traces light through color with gestural impetus, extending the exhibition’s scope to painterly abstractions. Capturing daylight also informs Yusuke Nishimura’s art. His Dayscapes are multilayered monochromatic photographs of a day’s changing sunlight on light sensitive paper. He creates a series of transparencies that seize the various light situations, their “colors being obtained photographically, (…) indexical to the time observed”. Here, the ultimate Reductivism is achieved through an absence of the artist’s hand. Dina Muenzfeld, April 2012 Caitlin Teal Price (b. 1980) was born in Chicago, IL, and grew up in Washington, DC. She received her BFA in photography from the Parsons School of Design in 2002, and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2009. She has exhibited both internationally and nation wide and her work is in the collection of the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum in San Bernardino, CA. Her work has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Details, Vogue, Vice, Nylon, Capricious magazine, Sony Music and Universal Pictures. Caitlin currently lives and works in Washington, DC. Claire McConaughy is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and her MFA from Columbia University. Solo exhibitions include: Art Resources Transfer; Carol Schlosberg Gallery at Montserrat College Art Gallery; and The Deutsche Bank Gallery. She has had numerous group exhibitions including: Against the Tide, Two Coats of Paint.com, online exhibition curated by Sharon Butler; Portraits, Storefront Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY; Twice Born: Beauty, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, curated by Shelley Bancroft, Boston, MA and Selections 45, The Drawing Center, New York, NY. “Unlike typical portraiture, the view is from the back leaving space for multiple interpretations. Each scene looks into itself and creates an inner life for the painting, therefore, the sitter’s identity and thoughts become the result of the viewer’s interpretation. Clothing and environment are often simple, but have motifs or colors that contribute to the narrative. A dominant element in the painting is the hair that is either tangled, knotted or silky and becomes a seductive element that creates psychological metaphors.” Dan Weihnacht earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and an MA in Art Education from the University of New Mexico as well as an MS from the University of Florida. He has had successful one person shows at the Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL and has been included in numerous group shows. The work of Dan Weihnacht reflects his interest in creating resolved compositions from the basic elements of art. He explores relationships of particular colors in the context of rectangles in juxtaposition. In the process of composition, the color relationships determine the size, shape, and positioning of the rectangles. The goal is to arrive at a simple, peaceful, and harmonious visual statement. Jarrod Beck is an artist with a background in architecture and printmaking. He has been a resident artist at the Fine Arts Work Center, Lower East Side Printshop, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Robert Blackburn Print Workshop and the Land Arts of the American West program. Beck’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice and the Austin Chronicle and is included in the Judith Rothschild collection of contem- porary drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Beck earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Architecture degree from Tulane University. Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com 8/11 JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY Jason Hoelscher was born in St. Louis, MO, and lives and works in Savannah, GA. His most recent one person exhibit was held in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited various group and solo shows in the United States as well as in Hong Kong, Stockholm and Paris. “Just as the early modernist painters had to deal with the perceptual changes wrought by the invention of the camera, I believe that painters today have to address contemporary changes in perceptual processing speeds, information intake and attention span, and make these changes our own. Beyond the initial gestalt read, however, there are elements of the paintings that reward additional attention: the use of classical geometry like the golden section; interplays between illusionism and literality; self-reflexive strategies regarding the work’s status as a mediated aesthetic object; and the creation of a pictorial space that combines an abstraction of Renaissance depth with a representation of modernist flatness. I do not consider my paintings to be strictly representational or non-objective; to the extent that they can be considered “abstract”, the process of abstraction proceeds from elements that are already abstract, if not virtual, to begin with.” Joyce Siegel is a working artist with a studio in Long Island City. She recently had a solo show at the Shag Gallery in Chelsea, NY, and works with the Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Joyce began as a self taught artist and much of what she has learned has come from her interaction and observation of great art. While living in London, Joyce became fascinated with paintings, sculpture and especially drawings. She scoured the galleries and museums in London and New York. She developed her techniques at the The New York Studio School, The School of Visual Arts and Anderson Ranch. Her work is in private collections throughout the United States. Joyce Siegel was born in New York City where she currently resides. She received a B.S. in Economics in 1982 from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and worked on Wall Street for 10 years. Joyce Siegel has been exploring the contradiction between spontaneity and control in her paintings. Her work is process oriented and focuses on the creation of the painting. She develops each piece in a spontaneous fashion. Lisa DiClerico is a New York born artist currently living and working in Long Island City, Queens. Her career as a restorer of antique furniture and objects heavily influences her work. She received a BFA in Restoration from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1999. Her studies included hands on training in the techniques of 13th century fresco restoration in Florence, Italy. Her background also includes painting, sculpture, ceramics and studio fur- niture making. Her artwork is currently focused on mixed media painting and has been exhibited most notably at the 2011 Industry Art Show. Marjorie Morrow lives and has worked as an artist in New York City since 1969 and divides her time between Manhattan and her Catskill mountain studio.