Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto, Adrienne Elise Tarver @ Hollis Taggart, NYC - Reminisce

Reminisce

Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto,  Adrienne Elise Tarver 

Hollis Taggart Contemporary, New York 

March 23 - May 6, 2023 

Hollis Taggart Contemporary presents Reminisce, a group show featuring new and recent work by Paul Anagnostopoulos, Jonni Cheatwood, Katie Hector, Justine Otto, and Adrienne Elise Tarver. Exploring the depth and breadth of contemporary portraiture, the exhibition celebrates the myriad ways identity can be expressed and portrayed through both painting and sculpture. Reminisce is the first exhibition in Hollis Taggart’s recently expanded flagship at 521 West 26th Street curated by Paul Efstathiou, the gallery’s Director of Contemporary Art, since the gallery consolidated its main Chelsea and satellite Southport, CT, locations. 

While the artists included in Reminisce come from very different backgrounds, they are united by their shared desire to push the bounds of portraiture, one of the oldest and most common genres of art. Featuring both portraits of specific people as well as of anonymous individuals, the faces and figures in Reminisce at times pose and directly confront the viewer, and at others look away or are blurred, withholding direct eye contact. There are figures pictured in domestic spaces and in elaborate landscapes, as well as some who have become one with their surroundings. Taken together, Reminisce offers a view into the diversity of approaches to portraiture taken by young artists today. Details on each artist’s work follows below.

“The five artists in Reminisce represent the cutting edge of contemporary portraiture, and I am so excited to be returning to New York City with a show of their most recent work,” said Efstathiou. “Following more than two successful years in Southport, CT, I am looking forward to returning to Manhattan to curate Hollis Taggart’s contemporary division and to present it alongside the gallery’s stellar modern and more historic programming. Looking back at one of the oldest artistic genres through a contemporary lens, Reminisce is the perfect show to celebrate the consolidation of the gallery’s divisions into one flagship space.”

Working in acrylic and oil painting, the Greek-American artist Paul Anagnostopoulos (b. 1991 in Merrick, NY; based in New York, NY) reexamines and reclaims Greco-Roman imagery to celebrate queer intimacy and storytelling in the contemporary moment. His paintings combine figures from ancient art, queer erotica, and life drawing in fantastical landscapes that transcend time. Reminisce will feature new and recent paintings by Anagnostopoulos as well as new terra cotta vases by the artist, in which he updates the traditional form with vibrant scenes of gay romance and melancholy.

Jonni Cheatwood (b. 1986 in Thousand Oaks, CA; based in Los Angeles, CA) is a self-taught painter who mixes oil, oil sticks, acrylics, and textiles to create characters that are at once unrecognizable and universally relatable. Cheatwood’s painted scenes incorporate found textiles, resulting in unexpected textures and shapes that reference both interior and exterior spaces. Reminisce will feature Cheatwood’s most recent works, including Mama T’s Wall O’Crosses (2023), a painting reflecting the complex web of relationships between people and nature that encourages viewers to contemplate their own place within this interconnected system.

The works of Katie Hector (b. 1992 Lawrenceville, NJ; based in Los Angeles, CA) are composite portraits in which she layers bleach and dye, building up and erasing her materials to create blurred figures that have a glowing and almost ghostlike effect. Referring to her portraits as “allegories for longing, intimacy, and grief in response to isolation and dissociation,” the three works in Reminisce were all made this year, and reflect upon contemporary feelings of isolation and dissociation within our collective image-dominant culture.

The paintings of Justine Otto (b. 1974 in Zabrze, Poland; based in Hamburg, Germany) straddle abstraction and figuration, with hints of faces and figures emerging from abstract shapes and forms. Reminisce will feature both individual and group portraits by the artist, demonstrating her ability to apply her unique visual language to detailed studies of individuals as well as elaborate populated scenes. Reminisce will include new and recent paintings by the artist. Otto has been represented by the gallery since summer 2022.

Returning to Hollis Taggart for the first time following the successful two-person exhibition History Reclaimed in early 2020, Adrienne Elise Tarver (b. 1985 in NJ; based in Brooklyn, NY) will present recent works in which she continues to engage with the invisibility and complexity of Black female identity. Reminisce includes two large-scale collage works in which the artist uses water and the tropics as a starting point to reflect on the mythology of origin stories and histories of displacement of the Black diaspora.

HOLLIS TAGGART CONTEMPORARY

521 West 26th Street, New York, NY

www.hollistaggart.com

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Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works @ Hollis Taggart Gallery, NYC - Wild Growth: Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955

Wild Growth 

Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955

Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York

March 23 – April 15, 2023

Hollis Taggart announces the representation of the estate of Japanese-American artist Ralph Iwamoto, known mostly for his abstract and minimalist paintings. To celebrate the representation of the estate, the gallery will present a focused exhibition of paintings from the very beginning of Iwamoto’s career: 1955, when he first exhibited his work in New York City.  These surrealist paintings explore the flora and fauna of his native Hawaii, as well as other organic forms, through a vibrant palette and techniques found in the art of Japan, the home country of both of Iwamoto’s parents. Wild Growth: Ralph Iwamoto, Surrealist Works from 1955 is the first in a series of exhibitions at Hollis Taggart that will explore various facets of the artist’s career.

Ralph Iwamoto (1927-2013) was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Japanese Buddhist parents. Iwamoto witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a teenager in 1941, and, like many others of his generation who grew up in Hawaii, served in the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York City, where he fully immersed himself in the art world, enrolling in the Arts Students League with the support of the G.I. Bill and eventually forming close relationships with artists who would go on the form the Minimalist movement, including Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Dan Flavin. Despite being exhibited in the Whitney in 1958 as well as in several other group shows at museums and galleries across the United States, Iwamoto’s career and work has not been studied or exhibited nearly as extensively as that of his peers.

 “Since its founding, Hollis Taggart has been committed to advancing knowledge about under-recognized American artists and to working to restate their importance in the canon,” said Hollis Taggart. “We are thrilled that Ralph Iwamoto’s estate chose to work with us to promote scholarship about this multifaceted artist who was deeply embedded in the NYC arts scene but has been largely written out of narratives about it. We’re excited to begin the journey of reintroducing Iwamoto’s art to audiences through a focused look at one seminal year in his career: 1955.”

Though his Hawaiian-Japanese background remained very important to Iwamoto throughout his life, the experiences he had in New York City, as well as the community he formed here, were seminal to his development as an artist. Among other notable experiences, Iwamoto worked as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art from 1957 to 1960. This job allowed him to spend significant time with the work of artists he deeply admired, including the surrealist imagery of Wifredo Lam, Rufino Tamayo, and Pablo Picasso. While Iwamoto worked at the MoMA following his creation of the paintings on view in Wild Growth, it is clear these artists influenced him throughout the 1950s. During this time, Iwamoto also worked at a store specializing in native Hawaiian goods and flowers called “Orchids of Hawaii.” This medley of experiences is clearly reflected in the surrealist forms of the flora and fauna found in his 1955 paintings, which are populated by “an invented taxonomy of kingdom hybrids,” as described by curator Jeffrey Wechsler in the catalogue essay.

While Wild Growth focuses on paintings from 1955, future exhibitions at Hollis Taggart will explore other important periods of Iwamoto’s career, including his experimentation with rigorous geometricism in the 1960s as well as his intense focus on the octagon in his minimalist compositions of the 1970s.

HOLLIS TAGGART

521 West 26th Street, New York NY 10001

www.hollistaggart.com

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