Domenico Zindato @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - 'On the Dotted Line' Exhibition + A Book offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

November 7 – December 20, 2025

Andrew Edlin Gallery present On the Dotted Line, an exhibition of recent paintings by Domenico Zindato—his fifth with the gallery and the first solo presentation in our new space in Tribeca. A hardcover publication dedicated to the artist accompanies the exhibition, offering the most comprehensive view of his recent work to date. A Kabinett presentation of Zindato’s work will be held at Art Basel Miami Beach (December 5–8).

Domenico Zindato: On the Dotted Line

Published by Andrew Edlin Gallery, 2025

Book Cover courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery

The accompanying monograph provides critical context for the exhibition with an essay by Julián Gómez Sánchez, a conversation between Zindato and Gallery Director Aurélie Bernard Wortsman, more than 30 full-color plates, and archival materials that reveal the artist’s influences and process. As a lasting record of this pivotal moment in his career, the book underscores Zindato’s shift from drawing to painting and places his work within a broader Latin American arthistorical and cultural framework.

Domenico Zindato (b. 1966, Reggio Calabria, Italy) is known for his intricate, trance-like compositions rooted in ritual, intuition, and meditative mark-making. For decades, he concentrated on detailed drawings in ink and pastel on paper, producing labyrinthine works that tread between the ecstatic and the contemplative. In this new body of work, he expands into painting on both canvas and dried leaves. Although he first experimented with canvas in the 1980s, Domenico Zindato did not return to the medium until 2020, this time working with acrylic paints and Flashe—a process he likens to acupuncture: “where the skin is activated by needles—I use my fingers to touch the blank canvas, delineating lines and shapes that I intuitively develop.” This tactile method has been central to his work since the early 1990s, when, while in Paris, he received a box of soft pastels from the legendary Sennelier store. Rubbing pigment directly with his fingers became a formative gesture—bridging body and surface, energy and image.

Based in Mexico since the late 1990s, Domenico Zindato draws deeply from the country’s visual culture: the radiant hues of Oaxacan textiles, the geometric patterns of Zapotec temples, and the visionary palette of Huichol yarn paintings and beadwork. These influences intertwine with his own experiences with peyote and the vivid inner imagery inspired by its use. His small paintings on dried leaves, collected from his surroundings, evince a reverence for nature imbued with fragility and impermanence—these intimate works seem to breathe with life. Across both large canvases and delicate leaves, Zindato’s compositions pulse with organic patterning, recurring symbols, and motifs that stretch beyond the frame, evoking mythological cycles and the interconnectedness of ecosystems.

A highlight of the exhibition, …..each one its special radiance….., is a large-scale painting that incorporates an excerpt from Marcel Proust’s Time Regained. Handwritten in Zindato’s signature cursive script, the words—“Instead of seeing one world only, we see that world multiply itself, and we have many worlds, each one with its special radiance”—undulate across a dense, foliage-like ground. The phrase resonates as both a reflection on perception and a metaphor for Zindato’s art: a vision of worlds multiplying, expanding, and connecting. 

Scholar Julián Gómez Sánchez places his visual language within a broader continuum of Latin American artists engaged with themes of transcendence and interconnectedness, drawing a parallel with Shipibo-Conibo artist Sara Flores, whose kené designs embody flora, fauna, and spiritual realms. Zindato’s work, too, emerges as a meditation on the unseen threads that bind us—to one another, to the natural world, and to the sacred.

Discovered in the 1990s by the maverick art dealer Phyllis Kind (1933-2018), Domenico Zindato has been represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery since 2009. His work has been featured in major exhibitions including As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither at The Menil Collection (2016) and The Hidden Art: Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Self-Taught Artists from the Audrey B. Heckler Collection, co-published by Rizzoli and the American Folk Art Museum (2017). A previous gallery publication, Domenico Zindato: Recent Drawings (2013), includes an essay by critic Edward M. Gómez. His works are held in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum (New York), The Menil Collection (Houston), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the Whitworth Gallery (Manchester, UK).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 

392 Broadway, New York, NY 10013

www.edlingallery.com

Abraham Lincoln Walker @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - Text by Dan Cameron

Abraham Lincoln Walker 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

February 22 – April 5, 2025 

Text by Dan Cameron 

Andrew Edlin presents the first NYC gallery exhibition for the late East St. Louis artist Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993). Although Walker participated in a handful of regional group exhibitions during his lifetime, he had little desire to show his art publicly, preferring to work in near-complete solitude in the basement of his East St. Louis home, a few blocks from where Miles Davis grew up.

For most of his adult life, the people in his immediate orbit knew Walker as the owner of a successful house painting business, Lincoln Walker Painting and Decorating Company. Born in Henderson, Kentucky, Walker went to live with his aunt and uncle in East Saint Louis when he was five or six years old and became an inspirational speaker in the Church of God in Christ. He met his wife Dorothy, a social worker, and together they raised two children. Walker’s social life sometimes included the local VFW lodge and Pudge’s Tavern, and the numerous rathskellers found throughout the city. He painted in the early mornings before work, the evenings after work, and most Saturdays. According to his wife, Walker said, he would have started to paint earlier but ‘Who had ever heard of a Black Artist?’

Walker’s singular approach to painting was fueled both by his lifelong spiritual beliefs and by his personal experiences living in a city that was once a thriving industrial and cultural center but had become roiled by economic and racial tensions, including the 1968 race riots. At some point he became an ordained minister, but by the time he picked up a brush he had stopped attending services and questioned the integrity of various church leaders. While his relationship with organized religion had become conflicted according to his son, “His faith never changed, he always lived in his relationship with the Lord.”

Already in his forties, Walker was resolutely self-reliant in his approach to making art. He isn’t known to have formally studied art, visited museums or had art books at home, and no extant writings, recordings or interviews with him have surfaced, which leaves the paintings themselves as the best evidence of his rapid artistic trajectory: his street and genre scenes like Party Time I (1977) and Whatcha See is Whatcha Get (1977).

The 1970s were pivotal for Walker, his range broadening from intricate narratives in urban settings like Party Time I to the surrealist facial distortions and dystopian landscape of Widow’s Mite, painted the same year. In Old and New (1978), he transforms the physical composition of both figures’ complexions to resemble decaying vegetation or amphibian flesh — an effect that recalls the portraits of fellow Midwesterner Ivan Albright. Walker’s increasing confidence fostered a process of creative improvisation. He seemed to be discovering his figures within the paint itself, revealing ambiguously rendered faces, bodies, and limbs. His technique encompassed applying paint with a variety of implements, including pieces of wood or plastic that would leave behind a specific texture. Or he would scrape paint away with a palette knife to reveal the gessoed canvas. Walker also deployed his own versions of frottage and decalcomania to heighten his colors’ luminosity and the lyricism of his line. By the 1980s he was steadily articulating the mystical visions that would characterize his paintings for the rest of his life. Increasingly fixated on exploring celestial spaces, he layered overlapping fields of color to convey emotional weight and tenacity, as in an untitled painting on paper of a solitary man standing upright in a small fishing boat as a multi-hued sea rages in darkness around him. Even in his most abstract later paintings, it is possible to trace his subject matter back to the deep reservoir of visionary tales he recounted to congregations as a young boy.

     — Dan Cameron, February 2025

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

Artist Esther Pearl Watson @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - "Generating Auras" Exhibition

Esther Pearl Watson: Generating Auras

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

October 25 – December 20, 2024 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Generating Auras, the second solo exhibition for ESTHER PEARL WATSON at the gallery which held two previous exhibitions featuring the artist, Guardian of Eden (solo, 2022) and April 14, 1561 (group, 2018-19).

The paintings featured in this exhibition were inspired by the artist’s stay in Italy this past summer, caring for her father in his hometown of Ferno.

This past year, my father who is eight-seven, was in a motorbike accident in Italy. He spent three months in the hospital, and I found myself traveling back and forth as a long-distance caregiver. There is a painting in the show, Generates Auras, that features a large stoic donkey. Donkeys are often used as guardians of herds, bonding with them and protecting them from predators. I have to be a guardian for my dad.

Esther Pearl Watson grew up in a string of small Texan towns watching her father, Gene—an Italian immigrant who was adopted by an American family when he was seven—attempt to build a functional flying saucer. The amateur engineer, who might also be deemed an outsider artist, hoped to sell his homegrown spacecraft to NASA and use the earnings to alleviate financial hardship.

Esther Pearl Watson’s new paintings evoke a sweet optimism for the land and this country, evoking scenes by twentieth century folk artists like Grandma Moses, Mattie Lou O’Kelley, and Ralph Fasanella. Children play freely on lawns and in parking lots while in the background landscapes teem with fast food outlets and gas stations. Watson takes care to include even the most humdrum features—a Cheetos bag, a loose sock, snares of wire. These are richly embellished compositions with comet-streaked, celestial skies, and the artist’s glittering flying saucers hovering overhead.

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about comets. The auras they create are spectacular. There is a comet called the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is surrounded by its own nebulous aura or coma—an envelope of gas and dust. In his own way, my father is like this comet, generating his own aura, shaped by the changes in his body and mind. Just as a comet emits invisible light, he radiates a presence and energy that is deeply felt but not always seen, creating his own aura through this transformation.

Esther Pearl Watson ESTHER PEARL WATSON (b. 1973) received her MFA in 2012 from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in 1995 from the ArtCenter College of Design. Recent exhibitions include solos shows at Vielmetter, Los Angeles (2023), and Maureen Paley, Marina Di Luna (Hove, UK, 2022), Safer at Home: Pandemic Paintings, at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University (2021), and Dust it Off (2021) at Webb Gallery (Waxahachie, TX). She also published an award-winning graphic novel, Unlovable (Fantagraphics, 2009). She currently teaches at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 

www.edlingallery.com

Artist Dan Miller @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - "Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan" Exhibition

Dan Miller 

Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

September 6 - October 19, 2024

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Light Bulb, Socket, Outlet, Fan, its third solo exhibition of works by California-based artist DAN MILLER (b. 1961). A thirty-two-year veteran of Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, the pioneering non-profit serving artists with disabilities, Dan Miller has exhibited his work widely, initially within the Outsider Art community and subsequently at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Glossolalia, 2008), the Venice Biennale (Viva Arte Viva, 2017), and currently SFMOMA (Creative Growth: The House that Art Built, 2024).

Diagnosed with autism, Dan Miller is mostly nonverbal. He works ambidextrously with intense, frenetic concentration, obsessively layering words or phrases until their legibility is obliterated. In the period leading up to Venice (2017), Dan Miller began to create on a larger, and in some cases, monumental scale. This exhibition features a slew of recent large-scale acrylic and ink works on paper, highlighted by an imposing horizontal piece from 2022 measuring over thirteen feet in length. A painted navy blue and black background is punctuated by slashing yellow lines and scrawled, readable words like “fan” and “socket.” As is overwhelmingly the case with Dan Miller’s work, most of his imagery is indecipherable, however, in several mid-sized compositions, he repeatedly renders the identifiable outline of a light bulb.

In addition to the artist’s heavily painted works, the exhibition includes a select group of delicate ballpoint pen drawings. Where lone words appear to float to the surface in the painted pieces, these smaller monochromatic compositions achieve total abstraction. Symbols are totally obscured within shifting fields of color that emit an almost electromagnetic quality.

Dan Miller’s art is included in the permanent collections of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, CA, the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., among others. In 2018, the artist was featured in the documentary series, Art in the Twenty-first Century, produced by Art 21.

The gallery will also feature Dan Miller’s art at Art Basel Paris, from October 16-20, in a three-artist presentation with works by Forrest Bess (1911-1977) and Melvin Way (1954-1974).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 

www.edlingallery.com

Anthony Dominguez Exhibition @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - "Kindness Cruelty Continuum"

Anthony Dominguez 

Kindness Cruelty Continuum 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

February 24 – April 6, 2024 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by ANTHONY DOMINGUEZ (1960-2014), an artist who chose to live unhoused in New York City for more than twenty years. It is the late artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Anthony Dominguez was the son of a successful commercial artist in Fort Worth, Texas. He immersed himself in art from an early age and later took university art courses, but  never earned a degree. While in his twenties he moved to New York, where he found work at a commercial printing company.

At the end of the 1980s, Anthony Dominguez abandoned his East Village apartment, tossed his possessions and art materials into a dumpster, and spent the rest of his life as a homeless wanderer. Spending most of his time in New York, he forsook any semblance of security, sheltering in tunnels, cardboard boxes, and other hideaways. To his way of thinking, he had set himself free.

Anthony Dominguez never stopped making art and left a substantial body of distinctive work, all made from scavenged materials. Early pieces include small, black-fabric discs whose uniquely stylized imagery is imprinted with custom-made stencils and bleach applied with hypodermic syringes. Dominguez intended these round patches to be sewn onto clothing, and covered his own jacket with them.

This jacket caught the attention of Aarne and Tina Anton, who became the first to exhibit Anthony Dominguez’s work—at Art on the Edge, Tina’s nonprofit studio for homeless artists, and later at Aarne’s gallery, American Primitive, both in Lower Manhattan. Anthony Dominguez was represented by Art on the Edge until it closed in 1996, after which American Primitive showed his work until the gallery closed in 2020.

Exposure to a receptive audience propelled Anthony Dominguez into a more ambitious mode. He started creating larger, rectangular-format paintings that didn’t rely on stenciled imagery, although they retained the stark, white-on-black palette. He also began to expand his thematic focus, centered on his philosophy of radical freedom.

Anthony Dominguez’s early paintings portray the actions of stylized humanoid figures and skeletons in abstracted, stage-like settings. Often appearing in these compact narratives are butterflies, traditional emblems of metamorphosis. The overarching theme is the cyclical interplay of life and death. The artist typically worked on loose canvas or other fabrics scavenged from the Garment District. He stacked and rolled the paintings for easy storage.

The exhibition title references one of his most elaborate works, an untitled painting on a five-by-nine-foot sheet of black fabric. Kindness Cruelty Continuum was painted in a tunnel where it functioned as a mural. Anthony Dominguez removed it from the premises shortly before the building directly overhead burned down. Reminiscent of a game board, it features an intricate structure of stripped-down, stylized imagery including stairways, skulls, butterflies, a world globe, and a dozen tiny, anonymous stick figures, some bearing celebratory goblets. An arrow in the upper right, marked ‘EXIT,’ indicates the game’s apparent endpoint, where a skull adjoins a butterfly wing and a figure carrying a knapsack on a stick—sign of the archetypal homeless wanderer—ascends into the unknown beyond.

For years Anthony Dominguez relied exclusively on the white/black formula—metaphorically resonant as well as convenient, since it only required one color. He used paint he found in trash bins and scoured the streets for his implements—plastic condiment dispensers, drafting tools, and pens or brushes he made from found materials. Continually refining his style and technique, Dominguez expanded the range of his imagery and treated his themes with increasing nuance and narrative invention.

Around 2006, Anthony Dominguez made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn to painting in black on white canvas—a change that highlighted his work’s graphic punch. He subsequently switched the combination back and forth—white-on-black, black-on-white—depending on the materials at hand.

In 2011 Anthony Dominguez taught himself to read and write music and learned to make pennywhistle flutes by boring holes in pieces of plastic plumbing pipe. In an open-ended series he called Picture Songs, he began adding music and lyrics to his paintings. It was the first of three significant developments in his art as he passed his fiftieth birthday.

Second was a new addition to his palette—red, the color of blood and, by association, the heart.

Third was the emergence of overtly Christian iconography, imagery, and song lyrics. Crosses and stylized portraits of Jesus repeatedly appear in his late paintings—a development perhaps rooted in his Roman Catholic upbringing, but also reflecting his interest in early Christian mysticism.

In 2013 he returned to Fort Worth to see his beloved Aunt Celia, who was very ill and died before the year was out. He stayed into 2014 to take care of family business, then headed back to New York, stopping about twenty-five miles short of the city. In a thinly populated part of New Jersey, his body was found in a wooded area, where he’d evidently hanged himself from a railroad trestle.  Significantly, it was Holy Saturday, commemorating the interval between Jesus’s Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

During his lifetime Anthony Dominguez’s work was shown in New York at American Primitive Gallery, Cavin-Morris, Clayton Gallery, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning; in Philadelphia at Janet Fleisher Gallery; in Baltimore at the American Visionary Art Museum; in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston; and in the Czech Republic at the Galerie U Recickych, Prague. His work will be included in the forthcoming exhibition: 

Frances Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut opening in April, 2024 at the American Folk Art Museum, New York  (April 12 – August 18, 2024).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY 

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012 

www.edlingallery.com

Vahakn Arslanian @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - "Recent Work" Exhibition

Vahakn Arslanian: Recent Work

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

January 13 – February 17, 2024

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Vahakn Arslanian, his fifth with the gallery. The show features recent works made by the artist during the pandemic, including paintings of birds, planes and a customized motorcycle.

Nonverbal and partially deaf since birth—he can hear the roar of airplane engines and the high-pitched chirping of birds—Arslanian was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder at age four, yet nothing has stood in the way of his unstoppable drive to create. He has been a productive, exhibiting artist working on his own for the past thirty years.

Predominantly self-taught in drawing and painting and working in intuitive ways with recycled materials, the initial source of his inspiration came from Julian Schnabel, who has mentored Arslanian for more than forty years. When Arslanian was five years old he smashed ceramic dishes for the celebrated artist’s plate paintings—his early introduction to a creative career.

The four large-scale vertical paintings of birds in this concise show, loosely rendered with nail polish on paper, capture cardinals and blue jays joyfully perched on branches in what appear to be the four seasons;  a fifth, smaller, horizontal painting pictures a gathering of blue jays in a snowy winter scene.

Presented by the artist in gilded wooden frames, Red of Raining (2021) depicts a curious red cardinal in flower-filled tree branches of a spring-like scenario and Good Morning of Red (2021) shows the bird in a grayer fall forest. Red of Happy (2021), in a brass frame, illustrates a full-feathered cardinal on the branch of a red-flowered tree on a foggy summer morning (with the artist’s lead treatment of glass continuing the linear pattern of the branches).

Birds have been a favorite subject of the artist ever since he rescued a pair of doves from a live fowl butcher shop and brought them back to his studio. In this current group of paintings, they are seen sheltering in trees, which serves as a metaphor for the artist sheltering with family during the pandemic, when he was away from his studio and his usual materials, and resorted to using nail polish rather than paint.

Convair 240 Sabena (2020) presents another of his favorite subjects—an airplane—displayed in a silver frame made from a recycled airplane window. Depicting a Sabena Airlines plane (Belgium’s national airline from 1923 to 2001) departing with passengers and the ground crew unloading baggage in front of the airport terminal, it captures a childhood memory of visiting family in Antwerp, where the artist was born in 1975.

Rounding out this overview of recent works, his painting Prop Motorbike (2022) features a customized motorcycle with an airplane motor mischievously attached at the front to give it more speed or perhaps the means to take flight.

Vahakn Arslanian’s art has been exhibited in numerous venues in New York including Maccarone Gallery (2009), Vito Schnabel (2012) and regularly at the Outsider Art Fair. In addition, his work has been shown at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore (2009) and Marc Jancou Gallery, Geneva and New York (2013, 2015). His work was included in The Brucennial (2012), presented by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. His collaboration with Julian Schnabel, The Ones You Didn’t Write—The Maybach Car, was displayed on the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale in 2011.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bovery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

Tom Duncan @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - …It Isn’t Even Past

Tom Duncan: …It Isn’t Even Past

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

July 13 – August 18, 2023

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents …It Isn’t Even Past, its fourth solo exhibition for Scottish-born, New York City artist TOM DUNCAN (b. 1939), featuring his intricately constructed, mixed-media sculptures. Duncan explores the intertwined nature of personal and public history. Events of the Second World War—air raids over Britain, the execution of Private Eddie Slovik—are rendered within the visual language and aesthetic sensibility of a young boy consumed by Catholicism, comic books, and the depredations of history.

Born in Shotts, a mining village about halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Tom Duncan spent his early childhood there until emigrating to the United States, specifically the Bronx, in 1947. After attending classes at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Art from 1959 to 1964, he began working for the New York Port Authority where he built architectural models, including the original iterations of the World Trade Center. Much like Joseph Cornell, Tom Duncan has prowled the city's streets and junk shops for the cast-off materials that enrich his creative vocabulary. Discarded toys, figurines, and mechanical bric-a-brac are integrated with elaborate handmade cabinets to depict dynamic scenes of real and imagined memory. The process of collection, selection, and fashioning is meticulous —some of his larger sculptures have taken over twenty-five years to complete.

Portrait of Tom with a Migraine Headache is one such piece. At a height of nearly eleven feet this interactive sculpture is composed of vividly painted colored industrial materials, toy trains, human figures, model planes, comic book pages, hand-drawn scenes, metal, glass, enamel, wheels, dials, and knobs — its overall effect fusing Hindu temple and Coney Island arcade. The four-sided monolith allows viewers to step onto its base and operate the knobs and wheels that control the lights (sunset and sunrise can be simulated), trains, and circular displays of Tom Duncan’s drawings of remembered incidents. Viewers can also place their heads in close proximity to the four life-size representations of the artist’s own head and shoulders as seen from front, back, and sides.

Tom Duncan was deeply affected by the air raids against Britain, as well as the presence of a German POW camp nearby his village. He gives his memories explicit expression in Die Nazi Swine, a mixed media piece depicting a boy in short pants firing lightning-like red bolts of flame at attacking planes. His weapon, though, is an upended stool whose four legs serve as gun barrels.

Tom Duncan’s evocations of war trauma extend beyond his personal experience to include one of the war’s less valorous episodes. The Execution of Private Slovik is a theatrical-looking construction that grapples with the case of Eddie Slovik, an American army private who was accused of desertion, court-martialed, and executed in 1945. He was the only American soldier to meet this fate since the Civil War. A beaten-up footlocker sits on top a metal crate ringed round by toy soldiers. Inside it a diorama visible through a glass window shows the moment the firing squad shoots Slovik. The bullets and their trajectories are physicalized by lengths of taut wire painted red and yellow that run from the rifle muzzles straight to Slovik’s chest.

Tom Duncan cites Flannery O'Connor as an abiding influence. His images evoke the uncanny and can be unsettling, involving viewers in a narrative much like good fiction. Set as they are within seductively theatrical cabinets (that some pieces resemble altars seems no accident), the dramatic scenes possess at once the depth of storytelling as well as the epiphanic flash of poetry. In his recurring depictions of wartime violence as seen through the eyes of a child, history is particularized, personalized, and charged with mystery. The past, as another Southern author, William Faulkner, once said, isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.

Tom Duncan is represented in the permanent collections of the Box Art Museum, Hoghem, Sweden and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Notable exhibitions include Super Rough curated by Takashi Murakami for the Outsider Art Fair (2021), Raw Vision: 25 Years of Art Brut (2014) at Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, a solo presentation at the Armory Show in New York (2013) and The Art of War and Peace: Toward an End to Hatred (2002) at the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore. A documentary film, Tom Duncan: The Art of War and Peace, directed by Dean Kemph, was produced in 2003.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

George Widener @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NTC – Tip of the Iceberg

George Widener: Tip of the Iceberg 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

May 20 – June 30, 2023 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Tip of the Iceberg, its first solo exhibition for George Widener since announcing its representation of the artist earlier this year. The show offers a twenty-two-year overview of George Widener’s oeuvre, which made a remarkable entry into the art world around the turn of the millennium, seemingly from out of nowhere.

An awkward social outsider during his troubled youth, GEORGE WIDENER (b. 1962) demonstrated exceptional memory skills and prodigious abilities in the fields of mathematics and temporal calculation. After graduating from high school with honors, he spent four years as an Air Force intelligence technician, specializing in aerial surveillance. An unhoused nomad for most of his twenties, he worked sporadically as a day-laborer before going to Europe without a plan, traveling from one city to another. During these seemingly aimless years he filled countless notebooks with numbers, calendrical sequences, architectural drawings, and statistics. After he suffered an extended spell of withdrawal and anxiety in the early 1990s, he was diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome, which removed the stigma of mental illness that he carried from previous misdiagnoses.

Buoyed by a newfound self-confidence, George Widener started making larger, more ambitious drawings, in which he combined his architecturally related images with his obsessive lists of dates, numbers, and statistical information—material previously confined to his notebooks. These were his first works to attract the attention of the art world. George Widener’s compositions are often executed on patched-together napkins and scrolls stained with tea to affect the look of parchment. Seemingly torn from ancient manuscripts, his works are layered with accident, palimpsests, and esoteric knowledge, incorporating elaborate numerical puzzles and games, complex puns, palindromes, and prophecies informed by historical events. Visually arresting and mysteriously compelling, the work is numerically dense and can be difficult to decode. George Widener explains that complex pattern relationships among some of the numerically rendered dates can only be appreciated by super-computers that haven’t yet been built. For him the processes of calculating and rendering the numbers constitute “an effort akin to meditation,” and mathematical analysis is not required to appreciate the work.

George Widener has long been intrigued by historical catastrophes and traumas—their circumstances, the dates on which they occurred, and all the related details. He has made many drawings about such events, especially on the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic on April 15, 1912. The disaster, along with and cross-sectional views of the ship, figures in several drawings here, and the exhibition’s title alludes to it.

George Widener’s “Megalopolis” series represents his vision of a humane approach to urban design. His ideas about sociological balance are visually expressed in the bilateral symmetry of these urban plans and their street systems.

Other drawings incorporate his renditions of magic squares (or magic circles)—a numerical grid in which the rows, columns, and diagonals add up to identical sums. Appropriating the form for his own purposes, he assigns calendar dates to each section.

A more recent category of George Widener’s art is represented by a large-scale self-portrait from 2020, a selective autobiographical overview consisting of block-lettered texts and miniature-scale imagery in a narrative format. In the concluding passage he obliquely references the COVID-19 pandemic through a depiction of beak-masked plague doctors from the fourteenth century—the era of the Black Death.

George Widener’s engagement with current events is reflected in a relatively new series, “Krakow to Ukraine,” and specifically with his direct, on-the-ground involvement in the war as a volunteer with a Polish group transporting non-military supplies into Ukraine. Some of his experiences in that endeavor are mapped in these drawings.

The thread that links all of these personal, social, and historical themes is numerical—lines, columns, and blocks of meditatively rendered, calendar-referenced numbers. With rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and the continued articulation of his individual experiences and thought processes, George Widener holds out hope that his work might one day yield a new understanding of time and the unfolding of human events.

George Widener’s art has appeared in numerous exhibitions at museums in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to a solo exhibition, Secret Universe, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2013), group exhibitions have included World Transformers: The Art of the Outsiders, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011); The Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, London (2013); Great and Might Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, (2013); Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler, the American Folk Art Museum, New York (2019); and Outsider Art: The Collection of Victor F. Keen, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago (2019). His work has been presented at numerous galleries including Henry Boxer (London), Carl Hammer (Chicago), Ricco Maresca (New York), Susanne Zander (Cologne) and was featured in the group exhibition System and Vision at David Zwirner Gallery (New York) in 2015.

The artist’s work can be found in many notable public and private collections, including, among others, the American Folk Art Museum (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the abcd/art brut Collection Bruno Decharme (Paris), the Museum of Everything (London), museum gugging (Klosterneuburg, Austria), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art (Chicago), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), and the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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Terence Koh @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - Starting Now

Terence Koh: Starting Now

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

May 19 – June 30, 2023

Terence Koh

© Terence Koh, courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery

for

the next

 few 

 ears

 eye

  will

dedicate my life too a single body of work

no piece will bee larger than the size of the

  human heart

       each work is created using my natural

                                                         almost blindeyesight

ev e r  y

dot, line, gesture

breath thought

mome n  t

sings

god

                                              all is framed by me

                   starting now my life has    t o o    bee          transformed

terence koh

24 dec '22

lost angels

Terence Koh was born in 1977 in Beijing, China and grew up in Mississauga, Canada. He received his Bachelor degree from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. He is currently living in New York City.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

Beverly Buchanan @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - Northern Walls and Southern Yards - Curated by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman

Beverly Buchanan 

Northern Walls and Southern Yards 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

Curated by Aurélie Bernard Wortsman 

March 25 – May 13, 2023 

Gallery 1: Early Abstraction, 1971-1982 

Gallery 2: Return to Southern Roots, 1982-2012 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents an exhibition of rarely seen works by Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) from two distinct periods in her life – her early years as an abstract expressionist painter in New York City and her later return to her roots in art inspired by her complex views on the rural South. The first section of the show features the artist’s abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1970s, alongside post-minimalist sculpture from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second section introduces a later, more personal side of Beverly Buchanan’s oeuvre, her colorful depictions of flowers and small folk-inspired assemblages created during the same period as her well-known “shacks.” A number of the works in the show, many of which were part of the artist’s private collection, have never been shown.  

Though Beverly Buchanan wrote about her love of “making things” from an early age, it wasn’t until 1971, when she began taking evening classes taught by African-American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) at the Art Students League in New York, that her career as an artist took off. Abstract still-lifes that she made in Lewis’s class in 1972 are displayed here for the first time. That same year, her paintings were included in a group show at Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit space co-founded by Lewis and Romare Bearden (1911-1988), which showcased the art of emerging minority artists.

Having witnessed demolition sites in Harlem and SoHo, Beverly Buchanan evoked the visual erosion of architectural facades through what she dubbed her “Wall” paintings. In 1976 she presented a selection that she called “Torn Walls” in a two-person show titled City Walls at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. In his New York Times review, David Shirey described the show as “indisputably a tinderbox of a display that will cause sparks to fly” and “the kind …one sees more regularly at the Whitney Museum and at some of New York's avantgarde galleries.” Three of these paintings are being shown for the first time since that exhibition, forty-seven years ago. The show also includes a monotype, small studies, and a large painting from a series she titled “Black Walls.” The latter was originally featured in Shackworks, a seminal exhibition that opened at the Montclair Art Museum in 1994 and traveled to nine other institutions from 1994-1996.

By the late 1970s, Beverly Buchanan was further exploring the aesthetics of architectural decay through sculpture, i.e., cast concrete assemblages, made from pieces of stone, brick debris, clay, and cement mixtures. She arranged these works in clusters on the floor, documenting them with photographs, and exhibited them, notably at Truman Gallery in New York in 1978, and at the feminist artist cooperative A.I.R. Gallery in 1980 in its groundbreaking show Dialectics of Isolation, curated by Ana Mendieta. Some of the small black terracotta works on display may be considered as studies for these larger assemblages.

After moving to Georgia in 1977, Beverly Buchanan became increasingly interested in making what she referred to as “environmental sculpture,” artworks that mimicked exterior surfaces and were also site-specific installations that were allowed to decay over time and become part of the surroundings. Most notably, in 1979 she completed Ruins and Rituals (also the title of the Brooklyn Museum retrospective from 2016-2017), and in 1980 Marsh Ruins, with funding from a Guggenheim Fellowship. To construct the three mounds that comprise Marsh Ruins, Buchanan produced her own tabby cement. Composed of the lime from burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash, and other shells, tabby is what colonial settlers used to build structures in coastal Georgia, the location of Marsh Ruins. In her zine “Making Tabby for Brick Sculptures,” Buchanan documented the labor-intensive process of making tabby, a task that in the eighteenth century was typically delegated to enslaved workers. Two smaller iterations of these structures, with bits of oyster shell showing in the concrete, are laid out in the show alongside four other examples of her cast concrete assemblages. Though little is known about their exhibition history, we do know that the artist placed these cast concrete works in her garden in Athens, Georgia. They retain stripes of the green, blue, black and earth-toned paint with which Buchanan initially covered them. The faint outline of her signature “B.B.” is also visible.

Beverly Buchanan’s later work is intimately linked to her natural surroundings and folk art. As a native Southerner, she drew on memories from her childhood as well as the lush Georgian landscape and yard art of local self-taught artists. A passionate gardener, Buchanan produced vivid oil pastel flower drawings and small assemblage works. She loved to rummage through thrift stores collecting marbles, wedding toppers, and beads, to create what she referred to as her “Christmas trees,” and “spirit jars,” her take on memory jugs, a prized Southern Folk Art form. Buchanan was particularly moved by a visit to folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe’s home in Fayette County, Georgia, and reminisced: “Being at Nellie Mae Rowe’s home was like being engulfed in a magic forest of her work because every surface had a mark from her hand and the simple chewing gum works made you never take gum as just chewing gum again.” A distinctive chewing gum jug and pin are also included in the show. 

Beverly Buchanan’s art is held in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA, The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, among others. A posthumous solo retrospective, Ruins and Rituals, curated by Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur, was held at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2016-17. 

The gallery is indebted to Jane Bridges and Prudence Lopp for their insights into Buchanan’s art and life, and to Elizabeth and Andrew White, and Rachel Simon. 

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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Joe Coleman @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - 100 Seconds to Midnight

Joe Coleman: 100 Seconds to Midnight 

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York 

February 3 – March 18, 2023 

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents Joe Coleman: 100 Seconds to Midnight, an exhibition of four works related to the artist’s ongoing practice of self-portraiture and centered around his newest piece, The Sorcerer’s Mirror at 100 Seconds to Midnight, which took five years to complete and makes its debut here.

Executed with a single-hair paintbrush and jeweler’s goggles, the paintings of Joe Coleman (b. 1955) are epics in miniature, so packed with a dizzying array of symbolic, textual, and visual information that they are often compared with illuminated manuscripts for their exacting detail. This exhibition highlights a systematic return to his own visage, through which he investigates his physical, mental, and spiritual unease. Joe Coleman examines the self as a pathology, transforming the autobiographical into a kind of mythology or allegory while reflecting on the ills of the world.

The Sorcerer’s Mirror, with its setting at one hundred seconds to midnight, sits firmly within the tradition of visionary apocalyptic art and literature that we might associate with William Blake, whose poetry is cited prominently near the top of the work; or Hieronymus Bosch, with whom the artist has felt an affinity since childhood after receiving a book on the artist from his mother. Profoundly concerned with a contemporary eschatology, [or the theological science of last things], Joe Coleman itemizes the numerous signs and symptoms of our social and spiritual collapse—post-COVID syndrome, nuclear annihilation, pollution, the Ukraine war, genocide, wildfires, apathy, corporate greed, invasive species, cyber-attacks, racism, infrastructure collapse, space debris, pandemics, apostasy, familism (selfishness), and the Matthew Principle (inequity)— while in a lower panel depicts demons clawing at a doomsday clock.

The box-like three-dimensional structure of The Sorcerer’s Mirror is both explanatory and enigmatic. The curious shape, which the artist concedes is a bit like two overlaid pills, expands upon Joe Coleman’s ongoing fascination with reliquary forms. Funereal in tone, it is also a seductively sleek vessel. Less immediately evident but central to the artwork’s compositional and conceptual architecture is the mirror itself, which appears in the center of Coleman’s picture. Radiating its effects, this thematic trope plays out in the mirror-reversed images of Coleman’s great muse, his wife, Whitney Ward, on the left and right flanking panels, and metaphorically in a number of other couplings, including Trump with a terrorist, the dichotomy of male and female, and portraits of his mother and father fashioned in miniature sculptures out of toy figures he played with as a child. The mirror, like Joe Coleman’s renderings of himself in effigy, signifies his dual postures of engagement and alienation with the world, while reflecting back on us and our mutual complicity in the impending cataclysm of near-inevitable extinction.

The Sorcerer’s Mirror at 100 Seconds to Midnight is accompanied by three other Coleman works: Mon Déjeuner sur l’herbe avec la Dieu Fée Mère de l'Avant-garde (Luncheon on Grass with the Fairy Godmother of the Avant-garde) (2020), The Book of Revelations, Take Two (Vision of the Archangel Whitney) (2019) and In Contemplation of a Diagnosis of T-cell Lymphoma (2015).

Joe Coleman’s art has been exhibited worldwide including in solo exhibitions at Begovich Gallery, California State University, Fullerton (2016), the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010), the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007), Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2006) and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT (1999). His appearances in film and television include the “Lower East Side” episode of Anthony Bourdain’s CNN series Parts Unknown (2018), Julian P. Hobbs’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (2006), and Asia Argento’s Scarlet Diva (2001).

Joe Coleman’s life and art have been the subject of five monographs: Joe Coleman: Internal Digging by Joe Coleman, Susanne Pfeffer, David Woodard, and Markus Müller (Walther König, 2008), The Book of Joe by Joe Coleman, Anthony Haden-Guest, Katharine Gates, Asia Argento, Rebecca Lieb, and Jack Sargeant (Last Gasp/La Luz de Jesus Press, 2003), Original Sin: The Visionary Art of Joe Coleman by Joe Coleman, John Yau, Jim Jarmusch, Harold Schechter, and Katharine Gates (Heck Editions, 1997), The Man of Sorrows by Joe Coleman (Gates of Heck, 1993) and Cosmic Retribution: The Infernal Art of Joe Coleman by Joe Coleman (Fantagraphics, 1992).

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

_____________

Ray Materson @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC - Embroideries, 1990–2023

Ray Materson: Embroideries, 1990–2023

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

February 4 – March 18, 2023

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents a solo exhibition for Ray Materson (b.1954), his first in New York since 1996. The exhibition features approximately thirty-five artworks that date from the nineties up until today.

Ray Materson makes elaborate miniature embroideries from the loose threads of disassembled garments, most typically socks. His art speaks eloquently and directly to the myriad ways in which sheer need—creative, personal, and economic—can foster uncanny ingenuity.

Incarcerated from 1987-1995 for crimes he committed while in the thrall of addiction, he began to embroider as part of his effort to express a personal style within the constraints of uniformity imposed by prison garb. His first piece was a logo for a sports team he followed, and he soon made other logos on commission for fellow inmates who wanted signs of affiliation—national flags, hearts and flowers—to send to loved ones. As he became more accomplished and found inspiration in a book on Impressionist art, Ray Materson had an epiphany: his work did not need to be mimicry, but could be more serious; he could create his own designs and tell his own stories.

In contrast to the degradations of prison life, the humanism of Ray Materson’s art is palpable. He comingles the real, the recovered, and the imagined in intricate pocket-sized parables of debasement and redemption. What we see from the outset is the persistence of memory, the unfolding of family history, and the characters from his childhood that were important to him, such as the professional athletes he followed. The dichotomy between hope and despair, a light and darkness, is like a psychological chiaroscuro, with heroes like Paul Robeson, Mahalia Jackson and Joe DiMaggio, and the reminiscences of The House on York Road to Once a Young Man and Dad in Central Park, circa 1940, versus the detention dramas of Morals Charge, Waiting for the Man and Almost Free… At Last. Some of his recent works have hard-hitting socio-political implications, like Theater of Abomination (2022), a scathing response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

A Materson exhibition of this scale would not have been possible without the generosity of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation. Louis-Dreyfus (1932-2016), a businessman, philanthropist, and major collector of outsider and contemporary art, was a great patron of Ray Materson’s and amassed a significant collection of his work. Proceeds from the sales of pieces from the Foundation will benefit the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is dedicated to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty in New York City.

Ray Materson’s art is held in numerous prominent private collections as well the permanent holdings of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, and the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont. Previous solo exhibitions include those at American Primitive Gallery, New York (1994), University of California, Davis (2007), and the Mini-Time Machine Museum of Miniatures, Tucson, AZ (2015-16). In 2002, the artist published a memoir, Sins and Needles: A Story of Spiritual Mending (Algonquin Books, 2002).

Finally, the artist and gallery are indebted to Aarne Anton, whose early and steadfast championing of Ray Materson at his American Primitive Gallery, effectively brought his works to the attention of the art world and beyond.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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Secret Chord: An Ode to Montreal @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

Secret Chord: An Ode to Montreal

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

December 10, 2022 – January 28, 2023

“I feel at home when I'm in Montreal — in a way that I don't feel anywhere else.”

– Leonard Cohen

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents an invitational group exhibition of works by artists who are either based in Montreal or represented there in local galleries and museums. 

Featuring: Bill Anhang • Shuvinai Ashoona • Moridja Kitenge Banza • Myriam Dion • Jérôme Fortin • Allie Gattor • The Great Antonio • Isabella Kressin • Marlon Kroll • Leopold Plotek • Palmerino Sorgente • Karen Tam • Joseph Tisiga • Sally Tisiga • Ève K. Tremblay • Arthur Villeneuve • Marion Wagschal

Working in diverse media, from small ceramic or papier-mâché objects to intricate assemblages and collages to large oil paintings, these seventeen individuals come from many different backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities: contemporary, self-taught, First Nations, Inuit, Quebecois, Anglophone, Congolese, Croatian, German, Italian, Romanian, Russian. Their reputations range from celebrated (eight have had solo museum shows) to emerging, to even obscure, but all of them epitomize the vibrant multicultural spirit of Montreal. 

Shuvinai Ashoona (b. 1961), whose drawings were featured at this year’s Venice Biennial in The Milk of Dreams, and Joseph Tisiga (b. 1984), are both indigenous artists confronting issues facing their communities. Their works are a departure from the classical landscapes and nature themes often associated with artists from the far north. Using simple materials–colored pencil, graphite and ink for Ashoona, watercolors for Tisiga–they explore the weight of “ancestral obligation.” One work by Tisiga, An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure (2020), references the current drug problem in the region. Inspired by her son’s creations, Sally Tisiga (b. 1960) makes art out of traditional beads and wool. She also fashions intricate dolls bearing ancestral names, such as Grandmother Bear Protector of the Four Legged Ones.

Leopold Plotek (b. 1948), Marion Wagschal (b. 1943) and Bill Anhang (b. 1931) are all from families who fled the Holocaust. Plotek and Wagschal are perhaps the two most venerated Montreal-based artists in this exhibition and have taught and influenced legions of their younger colleagues. Each explores the notion of memory. Wagschal’s ghostly figures of family, friends and lovers, rendered with a sun-bleached, patchy palette, wear the heaviness of mortality in what are otherwise domestic and banal environments. In his large-scale canvases, Plotek interrogates the boundaries between the abstract and the figurative, memory and experience, subconscious and intellect. Johnny-Come-Lately, a large oil from 2014, was inspired by the artist’s passion for the Billy Strayhorn song first recorded in 1944 by Duke Ellington. Completely self-taught as an artist, the electrical engineer turned mystic, Bill Anhang has integrated LEDs into his artworks for decades. Working reclusively in his modest apartment, Anhang has recognized the aesthetic possibilities of the electronic circuitry and other hardware that he designed during the early days of the digital era. He was a pioneer in that domain, and his works are in some sense notable cultural artifacts of the computer age.

Jérôme Fortin (b. 1971) and Myriam Dion (b. 1989) use cut-up paper to create coded visual languages. In Écran no. 12 from 2007, Fortin cuts, folds and weaves together small fragments of posters from a Montreal film festival to fashion a large, patterned abstraction. In Elisabeth II, Le Devoir, Le vendredi 9 septembre 2022, Dion explores the local media coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s passing through a delicate mosaic of chopped-up articles, woven Japanese paper, and drawing.

 

Self-taught artists The Great Antonio and Arthur Villeneuve created idiosyncratic worlds through which they perpetuated their own myths. Anton Barichievich (1925-2003), who proclaimed himself “The Great Antonio,” was a 440-pound strong man whose feats of strength were entered into the Guinness Book of World Records and who performed on the Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan shows in the 1960s. He made his own promotional posters and postcards collaged from newspaper articles and shock headlines. Quebecois barber Arthur Villeneuve (1910-1990) experienced a revelation while attending Sunday mass in 1946 and began to paint at a prolific pace, covering every surface of his modest home, which he dubbed the “musée de l’artiste.” He went on to receive national acclaim, and in 1972, a retrospective was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. 

Karen Tam (b. 1977), Palmerino Sorgente (1920-2005) and Moridja Kitenge Banza (b. 1980) explore their cultural heritage by blurring the distinction between art object and artifact. In her series of papier-maché vases, Tam mimics not only traditional Chinese porcelain found in museum collections, but also the cheap knock-offs sold in Montreal’s Chinatown. Similarly, Banza, born in Kinshasa, revisits the traditional African masks exhibited in Western institutions. In his Byzantine-inspired Christ Pantocrator paintings, Banza covers Jesus’s face with these masks, thus, in his words, “restoring [their] glory and their function to be worn.” Italian immigrant Palmerino Sorgente (1920-2005), aka the “Pope of Montreal,” crafted a vast array of cardinal’s hats, tiaras, and crowns, which he exhibited in the 1980s at his secondhand shop on Notre-Dame Street.

Ève K. Tremblay’s (b. 1972) “photo-pebbles” are small porcelain pieces imprinted with photographed scenes of Lake Champlain, which connects her homeland with the Adirondacks, where Tremblay now lives. Marlon Kroll’s (b. 1992) modest-sized canvases with their ring-shaped abstractions are curious for their compelling palettes and subdued, meditative auras. Isabella Kressin (b. 1996)’s small assemblages, made from laser print on silk, felt, wool, and fiber, are filled with images of silhouetted animal creatures reminiscent of medieval bestiaries. Allie Gattor (b. 1994)’s narrative drawings inhabit a terrain of contemporized mythology showing traces of influence by the likes of Henry Darger and Antoine de St. Exupery.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

__________________

Ann McCoy, Paulina Peavy, Olga Spiegel @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

Ann McCoy, Paulina Peavy and Olga Spiegel

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

October 28 - December 3, 2022

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents three visionary artists whose various metaphysical interests and practices–such as alchemy, Jungian psychology, spiritualism and psychic automatism–unite them across time and location. Ann McCoy and Olga Spiegel currently live and work in New York City, while Paulina Peavy (1901-1999) was primarily a West Coast artist who also lived and exhibited in New York.

Paulina Peavy’s extraordinary body of work includes such diverse media as painting, mixed media works on paper, and film, as well as mask-making, crafted as a means of better accessing the psychic energy of her alien spirit guide, Lacamo. Like other significant modern artists who channeled otherworldly spirits (e.g. Hilma af Klint, Madge Gill, Marjorie Cameron) in order to convey messages deemed significant for humanity, Olga Peavy utilized a combination of abstract and natural forms. In an untitled oil on board executed between 1930-1960 (she rarely dated her work), the artist mixed fluid organic shapes with a pair of praying hands which emerge from nocturnal darkness, flickering in luminous colors like apparitions from another realm. A set of three oils from her Phantasma series, c. 1980, contain graphically bold symbolic forms that pulsate with vibrant color and energetic lines that call to mind such Transcendentalist painters as Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson.

Although widely exhibited in her lifetime, Paulina Peavy was relegated to obscurity until fairly recently. Her work has found a renewed and ever-expanding appreciation, and last year was included in Greater New York at MoMA P.S.1, Supernatural America curated by Robert Cozzolino at the Minneapolis Art Institute, and her solo exhibition An Etherian Channeler curated by Laura Whitcomb at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Andrew Edlin Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Peavy’s work at the forthcoming ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, November 2-6, 2022.  Peavy’s art is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, Washington DC.

Showing for the first time at the gallery is Ann McCoy (b. 1946), a New York-based artist whose long career as a painter, print maker, sculptor, art critic, and teacher has focused on the spiritual content of art history and art making. McCoy has studied alchemy since the early seventies when she was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1989, which allowed her to work with alchemical collections at the Vatican Library. For over twenty years she studied in Zurich with Carl Alfred Meier, Carl Gustav Jung’s heir apparent. She incorporated her knowledge of Jung’s psychological writings on alchemy into artwork that explored her own dreams and unconscious. She joins a significant group of artists working with alchemical imagery and ideas (including Joseph Beuys, whom she knew in Berlin), and the three works in this exhibition reflect her on-going explorations into this topic. 

In her large-scale pencil drawings, McCoy’s surfaces contain intricate layers of mysterious objects, landscapes, animals, and symbols that are rendered in exquisite detail and rise up like images in a dream. Her mural-size drawing Dream of the Invisible College (2018) features a sleeping woman levitating in the center as various alchemical apparatuses (an alembic distilling gold, a heated athanor) surround her in a nocturnal sky. Birds’ wings, haloed heads, skulls, and even a mummy here hint of psychological and spiritual life cycles. The artist tellingly explains, “Dreams are linked to the transformation process described in alchemical symbolism, the Alchemical Great Work…. My work strives to reaffirm the dream world’s place as a source of wisdom.”

Ann McCoy was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1989 and has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2019), the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2017, 1998, 1993), and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1996), among others. Her work is in many museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has served as a professor of art history at Barnard College and the Yale School of Drama and is currently an art critic and editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail.

Olga Spiegel (b.1943) was born in France while her family was in hiding after fleeing Belgium during the war. She moved to New York City in 1964. Nurtured by psychedelic art, surrealism and science fiction, Olga Spiegel has created a unique visual language where she can present, in her own words, “…spaces of wonder that point to ever changing notions of the Universe and our sense of Being….” The oil paintings in this exhibition span the 1960s to 2010, revealing the full spectrum of her styles and imagery.

In Seed (1967-68) a phantasmagoric cloud of swarming shapes and colors, both opaque and translucent, appears to flow directly from the artist’s hand in the manner of psychic automatism, a technique pioneered by surrealism, but borrowed from spiritualism. Jam Session (1968) has the same biomorphic stream, but with a fresh and vibrant use of color that reflects the psychedelic art of the 1960s.

Merging multiple dimensions, the human figures in Watching the Light (1985) experience literal enlightenment while meditating in an ordinary room that dissipates before our eyes. The most recent work in the show, A Window and a Mirror (2010), is an update of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), a reclining nude figure floats between a window and a mirror, two magical portals into the unknown. Drenched in pulsating hues of scarlet, the sleeper is enmeshed in a dense nest of interlocking tubular forms and floating blue orbs – it is as if we are within the human body itself, or even the very fabric of life. Olga Spiegel’s mastery over a variety of styles reveals an artist who has never hesitated to explore and expand her oeuvre.

Olga Spiegel studied briefly at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels before enrolling at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London from 1962 to 1964. In 1973, she attended a seminar at the School of Fantastic Realism in Vienna with artist Ernst Fuchs. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently, earlier this year in the New York-based group shows Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995 curated by Fred Tomaselli at the Outsider Art Fair and Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery.

- Susan L. Aberth

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

_____________

Marcel Bascoulard @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC

Being Marcel Bascoulard

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

December 11, 2021 – February 5, 2022

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition of French artist Marcel Bascoulard (1913-1978), featuring a series of photographic self-portraits created over the course of three decades. A painter, poet, designer, photographer and illustrator, Bascoulard inhabited an idiosyncratic universe of his own making. Though he left behind a diverse body of work, the photographs he took of himself dressed in elaborate feminine attire are the most intriguing, mysterious, and well-known.

Marcel Bascoulard’s life was filled with paradoxes. A recluse, he knew everyone in town. A vagrant, he was rumored to have a small fortune. A withdrawn figure, he remained informed on current events, purchasing magazines each morning from his neighborhood newsstand. A quiet man, he taught himself five languages.

Born in a village near Bourges, a small town in central France, Marcel Bascoulard displayed extraordinary draftsmanship from an early age. A reserved student, he possessed an incredible visual memory and was capable of recreating maps of France, Africa and Asia with acute precision. He held a deep fascination with trains, and hoped to one day become an engineer. But after graduating from middle school at age seventeen, he opted for the solitary life of an ascetic, living on the outskirts of town in a makeshift home made from the remnants of an abandoned truck with his art as his only possession.

Starting in the 1930s, Marcel Bascoulard sold and bartered landscape paintings and drawings of the monuments and medieval streets of Bourges to locals. Using simple materials, mostly ink, colored pencil and pastel that he would smudge with his fingers on recycled paper, his conventional souvenir pictures are near-photographic representations. He often traded these works for food and milk for his rescued cats, which often appeared in his drawings and photographs. While his drawings were accepted by the bourgeois townspeople, the same cannot be said of his photography.

Marcel Bascoulard photographed himself beginning in 1942 until his death in 1978 and brought to his efforts the same scrupulous dedication and discipline evident in his drawings. He sometimes photographed himself as an over-the-top derelict in rags with a scruffy beard (an accurate depiction of his everyday garb), but images of him in feminine attire predominate. His early 1940s photographs capture a performative period in which he appeared in traditional nineteenth-century women’s fashion, and used a photographic studio and dramatic camera angles. By the 1950s, he began posing in a consistent style, eye-level to the camera with spare, less theatrical backgrounds.

He designed his own dresses and costumes for the sessions, and often strolled through town in these getups. His appearance did not go unnoticed. During the German occupation, he was detained by Nazi officers for crossdressing, and in 1952, a French police report states that he was arrested for walking the streets in “the wrong kind of clothing.” Nevertheless, Bascoulard persisted, asserting in the report: “If I walk around in a feminine attire, it is that I find this more aesthetically pleasing. For the necessities of art, when I put on a feminine attire, I take with me a camera and have portraits done of myself by acquaintances.”

He carefully dated and signed each negative, occasionally adding text to the back of a print. In a curious and humorous example, Marcel Bascoulard writes on the back of a print from the 1940s, “les zinbécils son fortcontan deu montret leur tête parthou,” a French play on words that translates to “the idiots are quite happy to show their faces everywhere.”

Attempts to understand Bascoulard’s psychological motivations focus on the traumatic event in his family: When he was 19, his mother killed his father. She would spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric institution in town. Yet his images suggest little motherly aura, nor do they appear sexual. They capture the essence of an eccentric, self-assured individual who unabashedly inhabits his own world, following his own rules.

In 1978, Marcel Bascoulard was murdered outside of his makeshift home by juvenile delinquents who believed he had a stash of money hidden among his belongings. Though he had been considered something of a pariah during his lifetime, a vast number of Bourges’s residents attended his funeral. Later, a monument was erected and a square named in his honor.

Marcel ​Bascoulard’s work was first introduced to American audiences in 2021 in the seminal exhibition Photo Brut at the American Folk Art Museum. His work has been shown extensively in Europe: at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Etienne, France; the Fort Institute of Photography, in Warsaw, Poland; Halle Saint Pierre in Paris; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; the Punta della Dogana in the Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy; and during the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France. This exhibition is produced in cooperation with Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

Roy Ferdinand @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - Gert Town, Sixteenth Ward, New Orleans

Roy Ferdinand 

Gert Town, Sixteenth Ward, New Orleans

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

October 30 – December 11, 2021

Andrew Edlin Gallery presents an exhibition of watercolor drawings by New Orleans artist ROY FERDINAND (1959-2004), known locally during his lifetime as the “Goya of the ghetto” for his grisly, realistic depictions of life during the crack wars of the 1990s. The show features roughly twenty-five works made between 1989 and 2004, and marks the first New York solo exhibition for the artist.

Born Roy Anthony Ferdinand, Jr., the artist grew up in New Orleans’ Gert Town neighborhood and attended Warren Easton Senior High School, but dropped out before graduating, and lived most of his life at or below the poverty line. He began drawing as a boy, but it wasn’t until his mid-twenties, after he’d spent a few years running with a local street gang and then working as a mall security guard, that Roy Ferdinand decided to dedicate his life to art. Without any formal training and using poster board and inexpensive art supplies purchased at his local K&B drug store, he drew fantasy and sci-fi figures. But his conversations in the late 1980s with New Orleans dealer Andy Antippas, whose Barristers Gallery was showing the work of several Southern self-taught artists, inspired the young man to make pictures of the daily life that surrounded him, including the brutal flare-ups of violence that defined New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods. As he later reflected in an interview, “I realized then that there were hundreds of subjects all around me, the ‘black experience’…basically, our world.”

Before his death from cancer at forty-five, the world that Roy Ferdinand created through a body of more than two thousand works was made up of equal parts documentary and mythification. His largest group of pictures serve as an ongoing report on what he periodically referred to as the “black urban warrior myth,” wherein political and economic pressures on Black men in impoverished urban spaces brought forth violence and hyper-masculinity. The toll of these dual forces can be read on the faces of his enraged and/or anguished protagonists, who march indifferently into the crux of the sordid and deadly narrative of drugs, gangs, prostitutes, car-jackings, drive-by shootings, firearms, cops, and prison. Appearing less often than their gunslinging and bullet-ridden male counterparts, his objectified and degraded women also brandish deadly weapons, but they just as aggressively use their sexuality to entice, barter, or to defy the viewer — all of Roy Ferdinand’s subjects stare you down — to pass judgement on them. In an interview, Roy Ferdinand described the conditions around him as“ so common that to a degree I’ve been desensitized to it,” and he often visited fresh crime scenes around his neighborhood, accumulating a collection of Do Not Cross police tape in the course of his research.

Not all of Roy Ferdinand’s works are grounded in violence, nor was it always the central event of his compositions, but the grinding poverty is all-pervasive. Keenly aware of the political aspect of the conditions around him, Roy Ferdinand dutifully recorded the activities of folks who were leading uneventful lives: someone reading a newspaper or napping on the porch, a minister performing a baptism, or two restaurant workers having a cigarette break. He also made numerous self-portraits, often wearing an oversized Soviet Red Star medallion and always facing the viewer directly, as the dispirited but unfaltering recorder of modern life. Even when wearing his politics or his obsession with violence on his sleeve, Roy Ferdinand’s most notable gifts as an artist were a remarkable ability to reveal his subjects’ mind-frame through a single detail or gesture, and his uncanny gift for documenting, with unerring simplicity, the unique architecture of New Orleans’ shotgun houses, street corners, and tree-lined horizons.

Roy Ferdinand’s impact on New Orleans’ contemporary art scene was fast and profound, beginning with regular Barristers shows and a 1991 exhibition in the lobby of the Contemporary Arts Center, which writer D. Eric Bookhardt described at the time as “outsider art of a sort most people are not quite prepared to handle,” while noting that Roy Ferdinand’s harshest pictures weren’t even in the show. The renowned artist Willie Birch, remarked that “Roy’s work frightens a lot of people, but he was one of the artists I feel closest to it terms of trying to say something about our existence.”

Since his death, Roy Ferdinand’s work has been increasingly collected and exhibited around the U.S., including in the 2008 Prospect.1 New Orleans Triennial, where a selection of his drawings was organized by New York dealer Martina Batan (1958-2021), whose later involvement with Roy Ferdinand’s art was the subject of the documentary, Missing People (2015) by David Shapiro. Roy Ferdinand’s work is in the permanent collections of, among others, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), the Pérez Art Museum (Miami) and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), which will present a survey exhibition of the artist’s work in 2023.

This exhibition is dedicated to Martina Batan.

– Dan Cameron

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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