Aisling Hamrogue, Anna Kenneally, Lizzy Lunday, Austyn Weiner @ Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York

4 Artists: Aisling Hamrogue, Anna Kenneally, Lizzy Lunday, Austyn Weiner 

Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York 

Through April 24, 2021 

AISLING HAMROGUE 

Aisling Hamrogue’s current body of work is comprised of paintings that integrate horror and feminist theories. The appropriation of horror imagery allows her to reconstruct her experience of patriarchal violence into an established genre of representation that is committed to the fetishization and destruction of women. Her painting style is drawn from book cover illustrations and film poster design from the 1980’s. This style underlines the themes of narrative and fiction explored in the work. Drawing from both personal experience and mainstream imagery, these paintings examine the relationship between our private selves and our public representation. By reclaiming these pop cultural subjects, Aisling Hamrogue uncovers the hidden power dynamics underlying our society. 

ANNA KENNEALLY 

Anna Kenneally’s quixotic figures are sequestered at the fringes of society. Evoking a Victorian Gothic melancholy, they radiate the aesthetics of darkness as they navigate uncharted surroundings like vagrants picking over decimated landscapes. Anna Kenneally’s neo-romanticism favours subversive poses amongst erratic brushwork in order to highlight a disconnect and a warped relationship with the landscape. Ravaged by nature and engulfed by unruly forms, her characters reinstate the focus on their motivations, appearances of the self, and their clumsy attempts at reconnection.

LIZZY LUNDAY 

Lizzy Lunday’s paintings portray intimacy, both romanticized and at odds with itself. Working with imagery taken from media and her daily life, she paints figures with varying degrees of rendering and line work, situated in dream-like environments. The situations she creates between subjects present a tension between idealized representations of intimacy and its lived complications. Lizzy Lunday’s paintings embody a duality; her figures can be viewed as comforted or uncomfortable, real or imagined—with reaching hands that can be read as tender or territorial. 

AUSTYN WEINER 

Austyn Weiner is an abstract painter. She is exhibiting one monumental-sized work about which she writes: 

” The Oximeter Reads 76″ was originally conceived this past December on an abrupt trip to my hometown of Miami. I spent weeks pacing back and forth through my parent’s apartment while my father lied dormant on a ventilator fighting for his life. Time had stopped, and I found myself rising and falling like the numbers on the oximeter. Everything I loved had lost its purpose: the ocean’s current, the familiar hues of sunrise and sunset, and the liveliness of a world that usually set my adolescent soul ablaze. I preemptively felt the loneliness and heartbreak one would feel when they lose their person in life, when they lose their compass. I prayed to the elements: the sea, the sky, and all that surrounded me... they carried me through. They carried him through.”

FREDERICKS & FREISER

536 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.fredericksfreisergallery.com

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Kate Pincus-Whitney @ Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NYC - Feast in the Neon Jungle

Kate Pincus-Whitney 

Feast in the Neon Jungle 

Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York 

Through March 12, 2021

Fredericks & Freiser presents an exhibition of new paintings by KATE PINCUS-WHITNEY (b. 1993, lives and works in Los Angeles). Invested in the sociopolitical and emotive possibilities of the dining table, Kate Pincus-Whitney creates maximalist still life scenes replete with colorful and textured objects of consumption. Whether spilling out onto fabric surrounded by florae or smothering a wooden tabletop, Kate Pincus-Whitney populates her canvases with “things”—from food and drinks, to books and candles, to various utensils and wares.  Her cosmologies of both highly personal and universally recognizable subjects gesture towards the shared necessity of sustenance. They reimagine the still life as a form of narrative portraiture and harness the psychological power of the communal meal to tap into the collective unconscious. 

Unapologetic in her bold color palette, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s scenes are boisterous and frenetic as they buzz with ineffable energy. Theatrically staged to explore the duality of the sacred and the profane, the result is a complete orchestration of a picnic or celebratory meal. Kate Pincus-Whitney harnesses what Jane Bennett calls “thing-power”: every day man-made objects are imbued with a strange and not-fully-knowable aliveness. In Bennett’s conceptualization, we are subject to the “vital materialities” we encounter; Kate Pincus-Whitney’s luminous objects exert their own thing-power and become acting subjects in their own right. The tablescapes read as both sacred shrine and intimate celebration wherein food acts as both symbol and icon. Through these scenes, the artist offers gratitude to a childhood raised in the kitchen by her mother and grandmother, just as she invites her audience to take part in this intimate history.  

As much about life as about death, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s scenes are a contemporary investigation into the Dutch legacy of the stilleven, more appropriately called nature morte in the French tradition and naturaleza muerta in the Spanish. Apparent are the artist’s myriad sources that span cross-discipline: from the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to Maya Angelou to Tom Wesselman’s resolutely American approach to the still life genre, Judy Chicago’s feminist intervention into the foodscape, and Matisse’s ability to make juxtaposing colors vibrate, to the symbolism of Les Nabis and the aggressive, fleshy strokes of Soutine. And of course, it is hard to miss the Warholian Campbell’s Tomato Soup can that has been emptied out to house a cactus. As a self-proclaimed artist-anthropologist with a ferocious appetite, Kate Pincus-Whitney excavates the annals of history to consider rituals of consumption alongside identity constitution. With her debut New York solo exhibition Feast in the Neon Jungle, Kate Pincus-Whitney positions herself within a cadre of young artists who deploy the capacious logic of the painted object to assert, investigate, and critique personal narratives as well as communal politics. 

FREDERICKS & FREISER

536 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.fredericksfreisergallery.com

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