Clare Grill @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - 'Parlance' Exhibition - Text by Mark Krotov

Clare Grill: Parlance

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

October 17 – November 15, 2025

Clare Grill

Flit, 2025 

Oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches

© Clare Grill, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Clare Grill entitled Parlance.

Thick vertical lines hum close to the surface of Flit like folds in a translucent curtain. Toward the top of the painting, a faded orange circle hovers off to the right of a smaller, more emphatic version of the same. A sun and its ghost? A siren and its shadow? Clare Grill’s paintings are, among much else, documents of accretion, profoundly attuned to their own past lives and to the gestures that conveyed the work from there to here. These flickers and remnants of earlier work never disappear into the background—they linger, waiting for Grill to arrange them in pictorial space and activate them in the painting’s hierarchy.

For Grill, the background texture of a painting is as consequential as the marks and shapes that populate the foreground. “I care about the whole thing,” Grill says, down to the edge of the canvas, the corner where its face turns to become its side, which she attends to with her typically unwavering conscientiousness.

As Grill’s paintings evolve over months and sometimes years, she paints Signets, small works on paper that concentrate the most cherished elements of a work just before it’s transformed and repainted. Once Grill embarks on a new painting, she might return to some of these Signets, treating them as clues or leads—“more bits of information to collaborate with,” as she puts it. In this way, Grill’s artistic process itself becomes a key touchstone for her own work alongside other, more interior forms of inspiration.

The beautiful and disarming paintings in Parlance overflow with surprising juxtapositions of color and texture. They encourage infinite chains of association both stubbornly physical (the background of Flit as mesh or gauze, the possibility of a log and a stump in Lop) and mysterious and ethereal (autumn leaves drifting in a puddle, a sudden vision of the sky in Weld that one might confuse for a hole in the canvas). The surprising use of shadow in Flit calls to mind the blocky lettering on a midcentury movie poster, while the diaphanous simultaneity of shape and background in Dune is so enfolding that it can only refer to an emotion or a mood—to something total and all-consuming.

As pleasurable and open as these paintings are, they’re also dense with private references—words, letters, figures that might be words or letters. What registers at first glance as a constellation of stray components quickly coalesces into a parlance at once intimate and detectable to anyone willing to stop and look. Parlance is full of allusions to Grill’s great-grandmother’s shorthand writing, and to her young daughter’s invented “witch language” and her fake cursive, a pattern that possesses the fluid and halting quality of handwriting but isn’t actually writing—not quite. As with the traces of lettering Grill uncovers in antique embroidery samplers, these subterranean forms of writing exude meaning even as they resist definitive interpretation. Much like abstraction itself.

-- Text by Mark Krotov, 2025

Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA.. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai'i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, NY; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, Monica King Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. This is her third solo show with Derek Eller Gallery. 

Upcoming Exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery:

Nancy Shaver, Bus Stop, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

In the North Room: Karl Wirsum, Slideshow: Drawings from the Sixties, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Artist Kevin Lowenthal @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - "Mannequins in Audience" Exhibition

Kevin Lowenthal

Mannequins in Audience

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

October 25 - December 21, 2024

KEVIN LOWENTHAL

Through the Window, Through the Door, 2024

Oil on cotton on linen, 80 x 64 inches

© Kevin Lowenthal, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by KEVIN LOWENTHAL entitled Mannequins in Audience in the North Room of the gallery. With a background in weaving and textile, Lowenthal encrusts his surfaces with a textured mixture of cotton and layered oil paint, creating a rich, fibrous ground on which to build worlds, investigate forms, and uncover signifiers.

Confined to liminal, compact interiors, Lowenthal’s architectural dreamscapes are often inhabited by lingering, faceless figures. Provoking a sense of theatricality, curtains frame each scene, setting the stage for domestic interiors bound together in one enigmatic space. In 2 Blonde Mannequins in Conversation, the pattern of the figures’ hair matches that of the curtains. Rather than acting as hard, definitive boundaries, the curtains appropriate the fluidity of hair. This malleable relationship of forms ignites a cyclical reinforcement of performance and body, of object and texture. The settings in which these shapes and objects exist possess a vastness akin to a free-roam video game where viewers can choose to stay within the limits of a prefabricated narrative or enter portals that go beyond.

In fact, the initial source of Lowenthal’s imagery derives from the survival-horror video game Silent Hill. In some of the rooms in Silent Hill, wall paint peels away to expose bare concrete. This fracturing inspires the rip, or the glitch, in the painting Patched Overworld. Reminiscent of the energy fields and the jagged dramas of Clyfford Still, Kevin Lowenthal leaves parts of the canvas untouched in order to expose the pale, raw cotton surface. As if to provide a window into the canvas, Kevin Lowenthal pulls back the curtain to expose the thingness of the painting itself.

As in a theatrical presentation, Kevin Lowenthal controls how much information he exposes. In Through the Window, Through the Door, architectural forms are taken out of context and reduced to only their signifiers: a rectangle becomes a door because of the presence of a doorknob; a grid becomes a window only because of its transparency. Modeled after plastic heads, the human-like figure, or mannequin, calls attention to the synthetic nature of doors, windows, and furnishings. These familiar objects and their vacant resemblance to the real world create an overall atmosphere which is both mysterious and unsettling.

KEVIN LOWENTHAL (b. 1994, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Lowenthal received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowenthal recently had a solo exhibition at 243 Luz in Margate, UK. Recent group exhibitions include Brigette Mulholland, Paris, France; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Ruby/Dakota, New York, NY. This is his first solo exhibition in New York City.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Artist Jiha Moon @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - "Fool's Moon" Exhibition

Jiha Moon: Fool's Moon

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

October 25 – December 21, 2024

JIHA MOON 

What Happens When We Die?, 2024 

Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 15.75 x 16.5 x 5 inches

© Jiha Moon, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by JIHA MOON. Borrowing imagery, forms, and materials from Asian folklore and traditions, contemporary popular culture, and Western art history, Jiha Moon creates a mashed-up globalized dialect that speaks to identity, cultural displacement, and miscommunication.

The ever-expanding vocabulary within Jiha Moon’s visual language takes some new and notable turns in this exhibition. She explains:

“The title Fool’s Moon comes from my childhood memories of making wishes while gazing at the full moon on Lunar New Year’s Day in Korea. During those moments, we hoped for good health and happiness in the days ahead. This ritual has become a habit for me, and every time I see the full moon, I engage in wishful thinking. It’s not religion, totemism, or witchcraft—but in some ways, it might be a little of all three.

I’m presenting acrylic paintings on Hanji paper, hybrid ceramic paintings, ceramic sculptures, and Korean Bojagi which are quilt painting collaborations I made with my 97-year-old grandmother. I incorporate iconic images, shapes, and colors to convey my wishful thinking during these chaotic times. The powerful Korean Haetae—a mythical hybrid creature—is reimagined as my silly, helpless poodles in a large painting on paper titled Blue Haetae. In my ceramic piece Banana Wreath, rotten banana peels symbolize the aging process, especially that of a woman’s skin, and I seek to glorify this transformation by using crystal glaze.

In Nocturne (American Beautyberry), I use banana peels as symbols of second-generation Asian Americans—pejoratively compared to bananas, yellow on the outside and white on the inside—who are taught by their elders to survive through assimilation. These figures are camouflaged within night scenes, accented with the hues of American beautyberry. Additionally, I reference the Korean drag queen Kimchi and Keanu Reeves, whose life quotes resonate deeply with me, borrowing their voices to tell my story.

In today’s vulnerable climate, I feel that we are all fools, clinging to hope and making wishes—sentiments I capture and reflect upon through the works in this exhibition.”

JIHA MOON (b. 1973) lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received a BFA from Korea University, Seoul, an MFA from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Moon is a 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race in American Sculpture at Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 2024). Jiha Moon has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society and Museum, New York, NY; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, among many others. This is her third solo exhibition at the Derek Eller Gallery.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Jiha Moon @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - Stranger Yellow

Jiha Moon: Stranger Yellow

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

January 6 - February 5, 2022

JIHA MOON

Stranger face, yellow spirit, 2021

Ink, acrylic, ceramic, resin on Hanji mounted on panel

24 x 24 x 3 in. / 61 x 61 x 8 cm

© Jiha Moon, courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings and ceramic sculptures by Atlanta-based artist JIHA MOON.  Working with a palette of super-saturated yellows, oranges, magentas and blues against contrasting dark Hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and brown stoneware, Jiha Moon mixes ingredients from Asian tradition and folklore, Western contemporary art, and global popular culture to create a vibrant and personal visual language in both two and three dimensions.

Throughout many of the works in this exhibition, Jiha Moon incorporates a particular shade of “Stranger Yellow” which she describes as a “mysterious, luscious, yet cautiously high-key color that stands out”.  Born in Korea in 1973, Jiha Moon has lived in the United States for over twenty years, and this color speaks to her notions of the visibility of the Asian community in America, as well as her own identity as an Asian American artist. The Stranger Yellow manifests itself in myriad ways: as an enlarged Pop brushstroke reminiscent of Lichtenstein, as a banana referencing the pejorative term for an assimilated Asian American, as the flowing blonde hair of a Western princess or Goldilocks, and as the contours of sun-dappled mountains and ocean waves evocative of Asian hanging scrolls.

The centerpiece of the exhibition, a ten-foot diptych entitled Yellowave (Stranger Yellow), contains many of these moves and more. Simultaneously chaotic and meditative, the painting pictures a large fluid landscape of swooping yellow in which twisted and patterned fortune cookies mingle with flowers and creatures from Korean folk art. A Blue Willow pattern motif (coopted from China by 18th Century Western design) occurs throughout. In a seamless cross-pollination of East and West, Jiha Moon incorporates additional invented and appropriated iconography in other paintings and sculpture, including Mexican Otomi dolls, Milagros, face jugs of the American South, emojis, tattoo design, and peaches (a symbol of immortality in Asian culture and a simultaneous nod to Jiha Moon’s hometown of Atlanta). She deftly utilizes this ever expanding vocabulary of imagery to explore relevant issues of identity, cultural displacement, and miscommunication.

JIHA MOON (born 1973, Daegu, South Korea) lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She had a recent solo exhibition at Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL and was included in “State of the Art 2020” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK and “45 at 45” at L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA. She has had solo  exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Atlanta; The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, NY, among others.  She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Asia Society, New York; and The Drawing Center, NY. Jiha Moon’s mid-career survey organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum toured more than 10 museum venues around the USA through 2018. This is her second solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

300 Broome Street New York, NY 10002

www.derekeller.com

Katy Schimert @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - Niagara

Katy Schimert: Niagara 

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

November 18 - December 23, 2021 

KATY SCHIMERT

Blue American Falls, 2016

Glazed wood fired stoneware

14.5 x 20.5 x 11.5 inches

© Katy Schimert, courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture and works on paper by KATY SCHIMERT. A rigorous and poetic exploration of waterfalls, Niagara exemplifies Katy Schimert’s decades-long incorporation of autobiography, craft, and bodily forms, placing her firmly within the trajectory of feminist art history. 

Growing up outside of Buffalo, NY, Katy Schimert made regular pilgrimages to Niagara Falls with her family. Inspired by the sculptural paintings of the Falls by 19th century Romantic artist William Morris Hunt, she began working with clay to render this iconic image of majestic natural force. The way in which Schimert rolls thick slabs of clay and allows gravity to dictate the form is indicative of the unique formations of the Falls—be it the concave horseshoe from the Canadian side or the opposing convex curve from the American perspective. Building up and carving away the front, she leaves the back raw. Like an exoskeleton or muscle, the luminous sculptures lean and pull during the high firing process, connecting the power of physical form to the gravitational center of the viewer’s body. 

With a modeled front and a raw back providing a glimpse of the internal body, the varied views of the sculptures evoke a veil of water, a cloak, or fossil of a force left behind. Carefully carved undulating lines and folds imply drapery. “I would like to use the patterns of the draped body to depict the internal body, thereby dissolving the skin between the outer garment and inner body,” writes Katy Schimert. Pointing to Medieval and Art Deco representations of draped figures as archetypes for her sculptures, Schimert notes, “It seems they have an otherworldly effect as though the physical body dissolves to leave an emotional and intellectual shell.” 

As she has done through much of her career, Katy Schimert alternates between sculpture and drawing, allowing each medium to inform and influence the other. The slabs of clay within the sculptures relate to sheets of paper, thereby amplifying a suite of watercolors, painted in radiant, fluid lines of red, purple, and blue.  Along with the sculpture, these drawings proffer a new narrative direction for the iconic Falls, one that re-imagines them as a female body and explores the creative force of love, emotion, and intuition. 

Katy Schimert (b. 1963) lives and works in New York.Schimert is currently featured in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and recently participated in Moon Shot at the Moody Center For the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX. She is a 2020 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and an upcoming artist in residence at The Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. Schimert has exhibited extensively, with solo exhibitions at David Zwirner, New York, University Museum of Contemporary art at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, among others. This is her first exhibition at the Derek Eller Gallery. 

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

300 Broome Street New York, NY 10002

www.derekeller.com

Rebecca Shore @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC

Rebecca Shore  

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

November 18 - December 23, 2021 

REBECCA SHORE

Untitled (17-14), 2017

Acrylic on linen, 40 x 30 inches

© Rebecca Shore, courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Chicago-based artist REBECCA SHORE. Culled from several years of work, this presentation of intimate compositions highlights Rebecca Shore’s decades-long interest in the invention of forms whose existence is at the same time convincing and imagined. 

A graduate of the School of the Art Institute in the early 80’s where she studied with Chicago Imagists including Phil Hanson, Ray Yoshida, Christina Ramberg, and Karl Wirsum, Rebecca Shore was encouraged to cast a wide net in order to develop a rich personal iconography. To that end, she has looked to art historical painting, signage, fashion, architecture, stonework, hair styles, cartoons, stringed instruments, and gravestones, among numerous other things. Her dense files of imagery – primarily photographs she has taken over the years— are the building blocks of her paintings.   

In addition to being a painter, Rebecca Shore made quilts for many years which gave her the opportunity to delve deeply into pattern. When she determined that the imagery she was most interested in depicting was more conducive to painting, she switched mediums, but has recently returned to quilt making as a concurrent practice. Clearly pattern, and symmetry with its suggestion of the human body or face, are focal points in her paintings. At first glance, the bright graphic imagery appears both flat and perfectly symmetrical. The objects she depicts each have their own material properties, whether a cord under tension, a flowing curtain or ribbon, a stiff chain, or a rigid structure. Yet with further scrutiny one sees symmetry being violated, patterns subtly breaking down, and shaded gravity-defying forms existing in shallow 3-D spaces.  

Rebecca Shore (b.1956) lives and works in Chicago. Her solo show Green Light was at Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2021, and she was also recently featured in group exhibitions at Luhring Augustine and David Nolan Gallery, New York. Shore is included in Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art at Newfields, Indianapolis and participated in Touch and Go: Ray Yoshida and his Spheres of Influence at The School of the Art Institute, Chicago.  

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

300 Broome Street New York, NY 10002

www.derekeller.com