Anton Funck, Ellen Siebers, Muzae Sesay
pt. 2 Gallery, Oakland
November 12 - December 16, 2022
pt. 2 Gallery presents a group exhibition featuring work by Anton Funck, Ellen Siebers and Muzae Sesay. Though disparate in technique and resulting outcome, the trio of artists each create works that touch on themes of landscape, our built environment and a fascination with the natural world, all the while sharing in the pleasures of materiality and the act of painting itself.
Based in Copenhagen, Danish artist ANTON FUNCK builds dense compositions of hatched lines, dots and negative space to create metaphysical otherworldly landscapes. Through the humble means of watercolor on heavyweight paper, Anton Funck creates undulating fields of color that upon closer inspection reveal densely repeated strokes of slight variations on a given hue. The minute scale and intricacy of Anton Funck’s mark making lends the compositions a sense of vastness, as if we the viewer are looking upon an unfolding landscape, horizons, seas and celestial bodies all intimated through subtle shifts in color and line direction. With titles such as Hiding and A Shimmering Moment of Sorrow, the artist’s suggested landscapes are never overtly defined, the paintings instead reveling in their own complex ambiguity.
Hudson, New York based painter ELLEN SIEBERS creates intimately scaled paintings that encase a series of worlds within. Presenting a range of square paintings on panel, each piece no longer than a foot on either side, Ellen Siebers weaves dreamlike brushy compositions that oscillate between landscape and abstraction, each interspersed with a hovering crop of a contrasting image. Within Lemons in September, deep fields of rich black are interspersed by scuttling brushstrokes in red, viridian and umber earth tones, all immediately cut through by a small rectangular crop of a bowl of lemons painted in heavily contrasting warm ochres and yellows–a break of light hovering above the dark background. The effect is one of visual and conceptual intrigue as our eyes bounce back and forth, questioning the relation of the layered images. The paintings feel equally reverent to a history of painting and our digital contemporary and the prevalence of the screen within a screen experience.
Oakland-based painter MUZAE SESAY’s latest works continue the artist’s exploration of how we negotiate space and architecture through a unique hybrid of drawing and painting, simultaneously touching on the oddities within our built environment and the joy of art making in all its inherent materiality. Within House of Flags, a moody composition realized with a pared-down palette of mustard yellow, black and white, Sesay creates a spindly structure composed of thin black verticals, bisecting diagonals and sagging connections, each carrying a series of small triangular flags. The tent-like structure, contrasted by a brushy yellow background painted directly over the dark black creates an elegant push pull of foreground and background, a thin white crescent moon and a white rectangle break up the space. Yet the structure sits eerily vacant, suggesting a circus tent completely devoid of the accompanying jovial atmosphere one might assume. Muzae Sesay’s other work, Two 5G Radio Towers, sees a pair of vertical structures verging on naturalistic, tapering trunks and palm like leaves, each broadcasting a radiating waveform realized in a dark colored pencil over a dirty tan background, a vertical bar of deep mahogany running up the left of the canvas. Sesay extracts a poetic beauty from utilitarian structures while also hinting at the uncanny strangeness in the convergence of natural and technological worlds.
Written by Nick Makanna
pt. 2 Gallery
1523b Webster Street, Oakland, CA 94612
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