Mary Corse @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Mary Corse

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

April 3 - May 17, 2025

MARY CORSE  

Untitled (White Multiband With White Sides, Beveled), 2023

Acrylic and glass microspheres on canvas, 58 x 96 x 4 1/2 inches

© Mary Corse, courtesy of Locks Gallery

“My interest is in more of what I think of as pure abstraction … just as in mathematics, you’ll make a formula. . . asking a question into an invisible world.” –Mary Corse, 2011

Locks Gallery presents its first exhibition with California-based artist MARY CORSE (b. 1945). This presentation features a selection of recent ethereal White Light paintings, a body of work she has been making since 1968. 

Mary Corse is one of the few women associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Her luminous White Light paintings are made of glass microspheres, an industrial material which refracts light and shifts in appearance according to the viewer’s position and environment. Prompted by her studies of quantum physics in the late 1960s, Corse was searching for a way to put light into her paintings. Driving on the Pacific Coast Highway at night, she was captivated by the changing luminosity of the street signs and highway lines. She began combining these tiny glass beads with acrylic paint to create the illusion of light as both the subject and material of her work.

Each of Corse’s paintings is composed of geometries with precise proportions, prompting specific physical and metaphysical experiences of light. The surface of her paintings are rarely pristine; visible brushstrokes reflect the physical labor and systemic application behind each painting. Some works feature vertical bands, activating the verticality of the viewer’s stance. The luminosity of each band shifts in appearance through space, activating a subjective experience of light. Stripes seem to appear and disappear. At times, the surface appears flat while at others, it emits an ethereal light, seemingly radiating from within the canvas. “Nothing’s static in the universe. So why make a static painting?” says Mary Corse. “It’s an outer light, but when you relate to it, it becomes an inner light,” says the artist.

With over five decades of experimentation with her White Light paintings, Mary Corse proves her unrivaled exploration into the abstract nature of human perception. In her paintings, materiality and light is both absent and present, visible and invisible. As put by Art historian Drew Hammond, Corse’s paintings “reveal innumerable oscillating variations between these two poles of unity and multiplicity.” 

This inaugural exhibition celebrates Corse’s dedicated exploration of light in her subtle and powerful paintings. Her ongoing and evolving White Light paintings challenge world views based on external fixity and objectivity, honoring the power of subjective individual experiences, embodied perception, and change.

MARY CORSE (b. 1945) lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California. In 2018, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and in 2019 traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is found in permanent collections including the Dia Art Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

John Moore @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - "Charcoals" (Drawings) & "A Window Into Something Else" (Paintings)

John Moore: Charcoals

John Moore: A Window Into Something Else

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

February 14 – March 28, 2025

JOHN MOORE

Vespers, 2022 

Charcoal on paper, 42 1/2 x 45 inches

© John Moore / Courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents John Moore: Charcoals, a solo exhibition of recent works on paper by American realist JOHN MOORE (b. 1941). Featuring a selection of charcoal drawings created between late 2022 and late 2024, this series continues Moore’s career-long investigation of architectural and industrial landscapes and their connection to memory and time. 

John Moore is widely recognized for his poetic realist paintings blending realism and illusionism to create precise and evocative compositions. In this latest series the artist returns to drawing with an emphasis on tonal richness and textural depth. These drawings feature subjects ranging from the aging industrial structures of Coatesville, Pennsylvania to the coastal shipyards of Maine and the historical streets of Catalayud, Spain. With his characteristic sensitivity to light and atmosphere, Moore transforms these landscapes into meditative reflections on impermanence and change.

Moore’s charcoal drawings evoke the physical and emotional effects of time on fading structures. These works expand upon the traditions of American realists and precisionist painters, including Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford, who likewise explored the geometry and materiality of the industrial world. Like Sheeler’s masterful charcoal studies of factories and Crawford’s depictions of steel mills, Moore’s drawings capture the interplay of shadow, light, and architectural form. They also echo the American tonalists’ interest in mood and the ephemeral qualities of light, recalling works by artists such as Dwight Tryon, whose landscapes conveyed a quiet emotional power. While Moore engages with these historical influences, his ability to merge observed detail with imagined spaces and subtle illusionism lends his work a “distanced eye,” as put by art historian Debra Bricker Balken, that reflects on the passage of time. This interplay between realism and abstraction positions Moore’s drawings as meditations on impermanence, offering a distinctly contemporary perspective that invites viewers to reconsider the enduring resonance of industrial and architectural forms.

Architect Louis Kahn once remarked, “There is beauty in the fact that they are now in repose,” a notion that permeates Moore’s drawings. Through layers of densely worked charcoal, these works convey a tactile sense of the passage of time. This selection of works invites viewers to pause and contemplate the weathered surfaces, fragmented details, and shifting perspectives that imbue his work with cinematic qualities. Moore’s attention to both the monumental and the intimate—whether in expansive industrial facades or small, hidden moments in the woods—offers a profound commentary on the traces of human activity and the enduring beauty of structures in repose.

John Moore: A Window Into Something Else

Concurrent with this exhibition of works on paper, A Window Into Something Else exhibition features a selection of paintings by John Moore. These oil paintings spanning from the late 1970s to 2021 feature the artist's poetic realist renderings of still lifes, landscapes, and architecutral views using his unique blend of realism and illusionism. The show's title echoes words by the late filmmaker David Lynch, quoted by John Moore: "I'll look at a thing and see a window into something else."

JOHN MOORE (b. 1941) was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri and spent much of his career in Philadelphia. He is the former Gutman Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as chair of the department for ten years. He previously headed the graduate painting program at Boston University, and taught at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University and the University of California, Berkeley. At Washington University he completed his BFA and went on to receive an MFA from Yale University. Moore was elected to the National Academy of Design and has been honored several times by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His paintings are included in major collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many others. The artist has exhibited with the gallery since 1976.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Louise Nevelson @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - "House of Nevelson" - Exhibition of sculptures and collages

Louise Nevelson 

House of Nevelson 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia 

May 3 – June 28, 2024 

Locks Gallery presents House of Nevelson, an exhibition of sculptures and collages by the renowned LOUISE NEVELSON (1899–1988).

Louise Nevelson’s processes of assemblage have often been understood as her endless search for home. She famously said, “My whole life is one big collage” and “the way I think is collage.” A Russian immigrant who migrated from Kyiv to Maine, and later Maine to New York, Louise Nevelson described herself and her migration on similar terms as the scavenged materials she used to build her sculptures and environments. “Most of us have to be transplanted, like a tree, before we blossom,” she said in her famous conversation with her studio assistant Diana MacKown in 1976. In what was disregarded as excess or waste, Louise Nevelson saw greater potential. She collected scrap materials and stored them in her home, sometimes for years, waiting to brew them in their appropriate concoctions. Viewing her life in this way, and as one with her art, Louise Nevelson went about living if she were a collage, transforming the chaos of the unfamiliar into an order which she viewed as her own.

Though she is most remembered for her environments of wooden assemblages – skeletal and romantic architectures in themselves – Nevelson’s collages are where she embellished her quest to transform the detritus of life: setting the table, dressing herself, giving life to dust as she would to wood. House became home when she decorated her enclosures, imbuing them with yet further potentiality. Untitled (1983) can be read as a kind of self-portrait: a quilt of mismatched fabrics (like those Louise Nevelson would wear) is preserved with all its imperfections revealed, the stains and tears of its many lives exposed. The venerable quilt, loose in its bonds, is affixed to mat board with metal staples – a forceful yet tender attempt to repair what has already begun to decay. Perhaps more than her monochromatic sculptures, Nevelson’s unpainted collages give riddles and clues about their origins. Some evoke on a more intimate scale the embodied inhabitation of her wooden environments, while others reveal the insides of her found materials Untitled (1976) features an unfolded cardboard carton laid flat, displaying its aged interior. In 1976, Louise Nevelson said, “The nature of creation is that you have to go inside and dig out . . . [it] is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.” In her collages, perhaps even more than her monumental sculptures, we see Louise Nevelson coming home to a place that is, though not yet fully known, deep within herself.

“Every human being wants a home. It may be a palace, or it may be a hut; it’s a home. And so it’s as close to us as our skin…” – Louise Nevelson, 1980

LOUISE NEVELSON was born in Kyiv, Russia (present-day Ukraine) in 1899 and emigrated to the U.S. at age five. She later moved to New York and studied at The Art Students League of New York, painted with Hans Hoffman in Germany, and worked as an assistant for Diego Rivera. She was the featured artist in the United States Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1962 and 1976. During her lifetime she was the subject of two retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1967; 1980) and a traveling international retrospective in 1973. In 1978, New York City created the Louise Nevelson Plaza, the first public space in the city named after an artist. Nevelson’s work is held widely in public and private collections around the world.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

David Row @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - "Night and Day" Exhibition

David Row: Night and Day

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

December 1, 2023 – January 26, 2024

DAVID ROW

Untitled (Gold II), 2022

Oil on linen on panel, 14 x 26 inches

© David Row / Courtesy Locks Gallery

DAVID ROW

Untitled (Earth Gray), 2022 

Oil on linen on panel, 15 x 26 inches

© David Row / Courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Night and Day, an exhibition of small-scale shaped paintings by DAVID ROW spanning from 2017 to the present.

David Row’s quartz-like paintings transform the seemingly solid, two-dimensional surface of each wood panel into an expansive, multi-perspectival space. Using hard-angle edges and intersecting lines, these image-forms destabilize the illusion of a unified shape and combine opposing tendencies, such as rectilinear and curvilinear or positive and negative spaces. As described by artist and art critic Colin Edgington, these paintings are “heavy and light, solid and liquid, mutable and multiple. Luminous layers of paint are scraped and incised to reveal underlying dimensions of color, hinting towards infinite planes beyond the surface.”

In some pieces, vibrant, neon colors radiate light from the edges, causing the painting to pulse and vibrate as if emitting energy. Other paintings on linen stretched over panel feature more lustrous, metallic sheens that reflect and glimmer, changing color when viewed from different angles. The fluorescent and metallic pigments also bounce light around the periphery of the shapes to create an incandescent glow, evoking the changing sensation of vision at dawn or dusk.

DAVID ROW (b. 1949, Portland, ME) grew up outside of New Haven, CT and now lives and works between Maine and New York City. He received his BFA from Yale in 1972 and, after a year studying Indian music in Calcutta, returned there to complete his MFA. Since the 1980s, he has been in dialogue with the trajectory of abstract painting in New York, including artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Mangold. His works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including The Brooklyn Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego among others. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, in New York, in May 2008.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Louise Fishman @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Soliloquy

Louise Fishman: Soliloquy

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 28 – December 23, 2022

LOUISE FISHMAN

Coda di Rospo, 2017

Oil on linen, 70 x 88 inches

© Estate of Louise Fishman, courtesy Locks Gallery

LOUISE FISHMAN, Artist’s studio, c. 2015

© Estate of Louise Fishman, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Louise Fishman: Soliloquy, which marks the late artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features paintings from the past twenty years, which highlight several important canvases and drawings made surrounding her third, and final, residency in Venice, Italy from 2016 to 2017.

LOUISE FISHMAN’s (1939–2021) paintings are layered upon an improvised structural grid assembled out of strokes, skeins, and slashes of oil paint, applied with large serrated trowels and scrapers, along with more traditional paint brushes—and sometimes, her hands. Her dynamic surfaces are often intensified by their scale, she excelled at working big and many of her canvases measure over seven feet. While her work is rooted in the AbEx tradition celebrating process and materiality, Louise Fishman always drew upon personal experience informed by her identity as a Jewish, lesbian feminist.

Louise Fishman embarked on several residencies at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice: during the Fall of 2011 and 2013, and at the end of 2016, and many of her works from the past decade were inspired by these periods. Louise Fishman had a deep understanding and appreciation of art history, from her family background (her mother and aunt were both artists and studied at the Barnes Foundation), and her education at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and University of Illinois in Champaign. Being in Venice was a powerful experience. She highly anticipated it (for years, due to it being postponed several times). While in Venice, Louise Fishman limited her studio practice to drawing and watercolor, reveling in small scale work including Japanese style fold out books and note card sized watercolors. When she returned to her studio in New York, the effects of the residency became pronounced in her work. The theatricality that comes from the grandness of opera, the drama of the old masters paintings (Titian was a favorite) imbued her paintings. 

As put in the 2014 Whitney Biennale: “The melding of order and chaos that she encountered while touring the city’s famous blue-green canals and labyrinthine alleyways aligned with the direction her painting has taken since the early 1990s. Artworks that Fishman made during this period reveal her efforts to resolve the two apparently opposing tendencies she has worked through as an abstract painter since the mid-1960s - the hard-edge objectivity of the grid and the gestural subjectivity of expressionism.”

Born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Louise Fishman, lived and worked in New York. Louise Fishman’s work is in the collections many public institutions, including the National Academy of Art and Design, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Jewish Museum, NY; the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. She was the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others.

Widely shown for the past five decades, Louise Fishman’s first group show was at the National Drawing and Print Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1961. Her first solo exhibit was at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1963. Fishman was included in three Whitney Biennials: 1973, 1987, and 2014 (the last biennial at the Breuer building). In 2016, the Neuberger Museum of Art organized the artist’s first retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner and accompanied by a monograph; the retrospective traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2017. In Fishman’s hometown of Philadelphia, the Institute of Contemporary Art held a concurrent exhibition of her small-scale work, Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, curated by Ingrid Schaffner. The Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois presented an exhibition of Louise Fishman’s drawings in 2021.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Sarah McEneaney @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Home and Away

Sarah McEneaney: Home and Away

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Through October 2, 2021

SARAH MCENEANEY

Small Studio, 2021

Acrylic and collage on wood panel 

23 3/4 x 47 3/4 inches

© Sarah McEneaney, Courtesy of Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Home and Away, a solo exhibition by renowned Philadelphia artist SARAH MCENEANEY. This marks the fourth solo exhibition of McEneaney at the gallery and is accompanied by a catalogue in conversation with curator and scholar Janine Mileaf.

Since the 1970s, Sarah McEneaney has fervently captured the splendor and catenation of her environments, including her home, studio, pets, and neighborhood. Home and Away expands on this autobiographical narrative by including scenes of travel and artist residencies to give a fuller scope of her practice and how it shapes her body of work. The exhibition includes earlier examples of egg tempera paintings alongside recent large-scale works in acrylic and collage, chronicling a shift in technique and perspective.

Culling from her own experiences, memory and emotion play equally important roles in Home and Away. Like votive offerings at an altar, Sarah McEneaney carefully arranges her compositions to feature the minutiae of everyday life, but imbues them with historical and emotional significance. The objects and details that she includes in her depictions of her home and studio in Philadelphia’s Callowhill neighborhood, range from books to paintings to facsimiles of her pets (whose portraits are also featured in the exhibition) to abstract expressionist studio floors. However, for the artist, these spaces transcend their prosaic functionality to become shrines of domestic and studio rituals.

The dichotomous relationship between documentation of a familiar setting and the emotional reality of which it occupies is further exemplified by the groupings of each scene by the artist, allowing the viewer to experience the same setting with a different sense and materiality. In Small Studio (2021), Sarah McEneaney moves away from her traditionally egg tempera technique and introduces collaged elements. From drawings that she then photographs, cuts out, and affixes to the canvas, bikes, figures, and household pets take on new dimension. Juxtaposed with Studio (2016), which is the same physical space painted five years prior, Small Studio sees Sarah McEneaney explore new techniques while continuing her dedication to the interior and unique exposure into the life of an artist. This pairing shows the transition of the artist’s work and her everlasting commitment to her intimate narrative.

From studio and domestic interiors, the exhibition equally highlights Sarah McEneaney’s travels and artist residencies. In Dead Sea at Wadi Mujib, Jordan (2011) the artist paints herself drawing, along with her sister, while floating in the Dead Sea. The way in which she renders the figures invites the possibility of capturing sequential time. This work particularly highlights Sarah McEneaney’s unusual and skewed perspective as a distinct motif that runs throughout her work and embodies each piece with a unique intimacy. By flattening the perspective of the scene, one gets the sense they are entirely in Sarah McEneaney’s uniquely fantasized world.

SARAH MCENEANEY has lived in Philadelphia since 1973, when she came to the city to study at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts). She is the recipient of the Yaddo Fellowship (2006, 1997, 1995), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2000), the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1998), and the Chianti Foundation Residency (2009), among others. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art , Woodmere Art Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Hood Museum of Art, Mills College Art Museum, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, among others.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Jane Irish

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

February 23 - March 27, 2021

JANE IRISH

Supplicant, 2020

Distemper and oil on collaged linen and muslin

78 x 56 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

JANE IRISH

Finial Gold Star Mothers, 2020

Low fire whiteware, china paint, lustre, and underglaze

7 x 7 x 20 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Locks Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings and ceramics by Philadelphia-based artist JANE IRISH (b. 1955).

A prolific and self-described ‘history painter,’ Jane Irish creates confrontations and coexistences in her art between realms of history that rarely collide. In an artist statement she writes, “I think of myself as a sort of international regionalist, finding the history of Philadelphia, and then letting that history lead me around the world.” This approach was perhaps most embodied in Jane Irish’s epic 2018 installation at the historic Lemon Hill Mansion in Philadelphia (organized by Philadelphia Contemporary). For the project, she created a series of paintings based on the idea of ‘antipodes’—defined as hemispheric opposites referencing two points on the globe—and transformed two floors of the mansion into an immersive painted exploration of transhistorical space. Visual references in these paintings include the triangle trade of Henry Pratt, the 18th-century owner of the house; Poe’s writings in Philadelphia (Conchologist’s First Book, Barnaby Rudge, Pym narrative, etc.); 16th-century trade routes of Egypt and Vietnam; and paintings of the 1836 “Wilkes Expedition,” among others. The second floor of the space included imagery from the first national protest of Vietnam Veterans Against the War on Labor Day Weekend 1970, which began in Morristown, NJ, and ended at Valley Forge Park, steps from the Lemon Hill Mansion. Paintings from this series are on view along with a selection of new works from 2019 and 2020.

Central to the exhibition is a series of new ‘tapestry paintings’ made of oil and distemper on hand-stitched linen and muslin. In these works, Jane Irish uses two paint mediums and two types of fabric to create a hybrid picture plane that reflects her desire to construct and interweave multiple histories within a single painting. In the foreground, iconographical figures drawn from old masters paintings appear to float in milky ether across the surface of a traditional-looking pastoral setting. The narratives reference mythical and violent imagery from art history as well as moments of witnessing, prayer and mourning. Additionally, each tapestry corresponds to testimony from the Winter Soldier Investigations of 1971, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)—the archives of which Irish has collected and re-typed word for word in a performative act priming her painting process. An accompanying catalog with an essay by poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein explores Jane Irish’s use of source material in her imagery. 

Though not always clearly visible, the lineage of anti-war protest that began with VVAW is a central theme and subtext of much of Jane Irish’s work, which explores ways an artist can embody resistance through the act of image-making. Janes Irish says, “The overall intent of my work is to develop a visual myth and a visual truth about the build-up and aftermath of the Vietnam War and movements of resistance to it.” She calls this a form of “commemorating heroic resistance” and it reflects her longstanding engagement with Vietnam War protest movements, which were seminal to her youth in the 1970s.

Additional works on view include new paintings based on sketches Jane Irish made on-site at the Prado and El Pardo royal hunting lodge in Madrid. In 2019 Jane Irish traveled to Spain, where she made numerous drawings in the former residences of Spanish kings and Francisco Franco, where Goya tapestries are hung in the interiors. A continuation of her ongoing practice of visiting and recording the domiciles of old world rulers, these paintings are not straight realistic depictions of the opulent interiors but fervent and energetic renderings of the artist’s experience of the space. “Painting an interior, seemingly from life, or beginning from life, is only a cue. To me what follows is an act of truth. . . I paint in a view of it which tells the viewer the record is made by an emotive human being—corporeal artist, motif, and viewer in a single project of transforming or re-aligning the political act of seeing.”

Lastly, the exhibition features new ceramic ‘finial’ sculptures for which Jane Irish appropriates the 19th-century architectural form as a means of depicting interiors in the round on the exterior of the objects. Additional ceramics include vessels shaped like ships which are based on historical potpourri holders produced by Sèvres in the late 1750s and early 1760s. These vessels are loaded with narratives and motifs from the period and beyond. As in her paintings, she says, “My work constitutes a reflection on paradoxes of decoration and political order. . . One can be oblivious to what is contained in the wallpaper or on a vase, but one does so in unrealistic detachment from the world. It is all right there is front of us, but not easy to see.”

The gallery is open by appointment only.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Louise Belcourt @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Works on Paper

Louise Belcourt: Works on Paper

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

November 6 - December 12, 2020

LOUISE BELCOURT

Forest Paper Group #10, 2020

Gouache, acrylic and paper on paper, 14 1/2 x 40 inches

© Louise Belcourt, Courtesy of Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Locks Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by LOUISE BELCOURT (b. 1961). This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

Known for her bright and biomorphic “mound” paintings, Louise Belcourt’s recent works on paper depart from the traditional format of oil on canvas and extend her explorations of liminal forms into the realm of collage. Louise Belcourt says, “When the world fell out in March, I left my Brooklyn studio and started working in the attic of an old house just north of the city. I couldn’t paint there but that physical change made these.” These buoyant works made of large pieces of cut paper, acrylic and gouache are a nod to the energetic cut-outs of Matisse from the late 1940s, in which he invented a process of “drawing with scissors.”

As in her earlier paintings, which blend abstracted landscapes with urban elements, Louise Belcourt’s new works incorporate her impressions of shifting localities and weave the architectural and natural worlds into a hybrid dimension of forms.These newest works continue the artist’s interest in the effects of light and shadow while further investigating the shape-shifting nature of perception.

The exhibition is viewable by appointment only. Please contact the gallery directly at info@locksgallery.com to arrange a date and time. In accordance with recent safety measures surrounding the Covid-19 outbreak, masks are provided upon entry and must be worn for the duration of the visit.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Willem de Kooning and Chloe Piene, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Bodies of Desire: Works on Paper

Willem de Kooning and Chloe Piene

Bodies of Desire: Works on Paper

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

January 16 – February 24, 2007

Bodies of Desire: Works on Paper by Willem de Kooning and Chloe Piene is curated by Klaus Ottmann and combines a selection of Willem de Kooning's works on paper depicting women with Chloe Piene's autoerotic charcoal drawings.

In the mid-1950s, WILLEM DE KOONING surprised the artists and critics of his time by single-handedly resurrecting the female form, which had been largely abandoned by his peers. Between 1950-54 he created a series of paintings and works on paper on the theme of the Woman, which by some were compared to goddesses and by others, to whores. The women in these works were naked, either depicted singly or in pairs, usually standing or seated and facing the viewer, presented unashamedly sexual, with grossly enlarged mouths, eyes, breasts, and vaginas. Willem de Kooning said later about these works: "Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the Women, but I felt that this was their problem, not mine... I have to follow my desires."

In 1966 de Willem de Kooning executed a second series of Women drawings, this time with his eyes closed. In these works, the women are less confrontational and more seductive, but just as brazenly sexual. What may have made these works so scandalous at the time was that, despite their stereotypical depiction, Willem de Kooning's Women seem less like (sex) objects and more like subjects that embody not simply the artist's desire but a desire of their own. They recall the famous dictum by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that desire is always the desire of the Other.

The young, Brooklyn-based artist CHLOE PIENE has been making diaphanous charcoal drawings of naked figures on paper and vellum based mostly on photographs of herself and, occasionally, other people since the late 1990s. The frenzied yet controlled energy of the lines in her drawings is evidence of their performative character. They are executed rapidly, or in Chloe Piene’s words, “it comes out in one shot.” Chloe Piene’s agitated style of drawing is a strangely alluring complement to her unsettling imagery, which often imbues its autoeroticism with Vanitas-type morbidity. Chloe Piene sees her work as riding the line “between the erotic and the forensic." Unlike Willem de Kooning’s drawings, which relocate the Self in the Other, Chloe Piene’s inscribe the Other in the Self. Her drawings are of her own body. Their delicate rawness and nakedness exude a wide array of emotions ranging from anguish to ecstasy. Unlike Willem de Kooning’s, the sexuality in Chloe Piene’s drawings is less explicit. Anatomical details are veiled by the energy of her lines, while the erotic is being shifted from specific body parts to the lines themselves.

Chloe Piene is only one in a new generation of both male and female artists (Cecily Brown, Sue Williams, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney, Jonathan Meese, to name but a few) whose works redefine art in terms of the body and take a closer look at the nature or shape of sexuality and gender.

The exhibition is curated by Klaus Ottmann, an independent curator and scholar based in New York. Klaus Ottmann most recently curated the Sixth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial (on view until January 7, 2007) and has been appointed as the curator for the 2007 Open ev+a exhibition in Limerick, Ireland. 

Bodies of Desire continues the Locks Gallery’s Curator’s Choice exhibitions. Previous curators include Barry Schwabsky, Richard Torchia, and David Cohen. An illustrated brochure with an essay by Ottmann accompanies the show.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Sarah McCourbey, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Signs of Life

Sarah McCourbey: Signs of Life

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

November 4 - December 17, 2005

Locks Gallery presents new paintings by the artist SARAH MCCOUBREY. Signs of Life, Locks Gallery's third exhibition of Sarah McCoubrey's work, consists of twenty paintings and drawings depicting the landscapes of rural New York and Ireland. Sarah McCoubrey paints intricately detailed images of her environment that reflect the unique influence of time, both human and ecological on these spaces. She uses the technique of glazing to gradually build up the surfaces of her paintings, creating depth and intimacy in the picture plane that the viewer's eye can travel about in. Her landscapes come from imagination and memory, as well as photographs and on-location sketches, representing a delicate blend of the real and the created environment. Large skies, expansive vistas, and a milky atmosphere are characteristic of Sarah McCoubrey's works.

A devoted landscape painter, her work evokes the Hudson River School tradition as well as 19th century European landscape paintings; however, run-down sheds, signposts, and other signs of human presence often make an appearance in her paintings, subtly reminding us of a contemporary time and place. Aware of the weight of history on the genre of landscape painting, Sarah McCoubrey's body of work speaks for its remnants as well as for art's enduring fascination with nature.

Sarah McCoubrey received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is an Associate Professor of Art at Syracuse University. She is the recipient of several grants, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Milton Avery Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a New York State Council on the Arts Grant. Sarah McCoubrey’s work was included in the 2002 Everson Museum of Art Biennial and in recent exhibits at Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse University; Tyler Art Gallery, SUNY Oswego; and the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Gallery, Auburn, NY.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Warren Rohrer, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Morning Fogs Trees and Leaves

Warren Rohrer 

Morning Fogs Trees and Leaves

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

November 1 - December 14, 2002

Locks Gallery presents twelve, rarely seen paintings by WARREN ROHRER (1927-1995), one of Philadelphia's most important 20th-century painters. Known for his luminous, vibrantly-colored canvases, Warren Rohrer evolved in the late 1960s from a landscape painter to a deeply intuitive abstractionist. This exhibit focuses on the loose, improvised work from the early 70s that laid the framework for his mature work.

The artist spent the first twenty years of his career as a landscape painter. Most of his early works are highly abstracted views of the Pennsylvania countryside, particularly the farms of Lancaster County where he was born, and spent long periods of his life. Beginning in the early 1970s, Warren Rohrer made a decisive breakthrough in his paintings, which shifted toward abstract squares of color, punctuated by a grid.

The small painting First (1972) presages the rest of his work with its square format and allover almost purely abstract composition. Between 1972 and 1975, Warren Rohrer made the series of large, minimal paintings included in this exhibition. The works are noticeable for their stark structures--often with a smaller square centered inside the larger square of the painting--and simple, hatchmark-like brushstrokes, suggesting tilled fields, woven baskets, rows of seeds, or stitching on a quilt.

While the work of Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko deeply affected the artist during this period, Warren Rohrer's works retain their roots in his chosen subject matter: the planned and chance geometries of the agricultural landscape paired with the rhythms of farming life. In 1975, Warren Rohrer wrote "These processes of plowing, planting, cultivating and harvesting are very similar to my processes of layering, defining, obscuring."

The artist originally chose the title Morning Fogs Trees and Leaves for his 1974 show at Locks Gallery. Looking back at the period now, the artist was clearly then in the midst of a formative shift that became the foundation of his later work.

The first, large-scale museum exhibition of Warren Rohrer's work will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003. The artist began showing in Philadelphia in 1960 and had eight one-person shows with Locks Gallery between 1974-94. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum and Delaware Art Museum. 

An accompanying catalogue illustrates all of the paintings in the exhibition.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Eileen Neff, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Moving Still

Eileen Neff: Moving Still

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

November 16 - December 22, 2001

Locks Gallery presents a new series of photograph-based work by the Philadelphia artist and writer EILEEN NEFF. These fifteen images begin from the artist's photographs and combine several images that evoke both mysterious and playful landscapes.

Eileen Neff, well known for photographic installations at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Contemporary Philadelphia Artists, 1990) and ICA, Philadelphia (The Mountain, A Bed and A Chair, 1992) and as a critic and teacher, has most recently photographed interiors and the landscape as seen from the commuter train from Philadelphia to New York. This is her first exhibition at Locks Gallery and her largest solo exhibition since 1997.

Previously, Eileen Neff's photographs turned into actual objects, combining furniture or picture frames with landscapes or interiors. In these new works, the complex structures of the installation are embodied in the individual photographs. Working from a conceptual impulse to trigger memory or reflection, Neff's landscapes pose questions about presence and perception.

The seemingly natural landscapes are in fact constructions that allow Eileen Neff to question what is seen versus what is imagined. In this group of works, generated from her train photographs, movement and time seem to exist in different states within the same landscape.

EILEEN NEFF received a B.A. from Temple University, a B.F.A. from Philadelphia College of Art and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, New York; Artists Space, New York; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. She has received numerous awards and grants, including an NEA Photography Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Leeway Foundation Grant. Eileen Neff has been a regular contributor to Artforum since 1989 and has taught at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981 she has been an instructor at the University of the Arts.

A full color catalogue with an essay by Dominique Nahas accompanies the exhibition.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Thomas Chimes, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - Complete Circle

Thomas Chimes: Complete Circle

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

January 19 - February 24, 2001

Complete Circle presents the early and later work of noted artist THOMAS CHIMES: a series of metal box constructions from 1965-1973 paired with related new paintings. Thomas Chimes is best known for his portraits of fin-de-siecle literary figures painted on wood panels, which followed the box series and large-scale white portraits where the figures emerge from a glowing, mist-like background.

The intricate design of Thomas Chimes's metal boxes, with their inlaid drawings, precision gadgetry and murky peep holes are a witty and allusive synthesis of Surrealism, Art Deco, and Pop. Their sensuous curves are often paired with technical drawings and words resembling the caricatures and equations of his recent paintings.

Starting with the metal boxes, Thomas Chimes has identified with the work of the French Symbolist writer, Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), an originator of the Theater of the Absurd and a pivotal figure in the transition from Symbolism to modernism. Thomas Chimes always approaches Jarry in a conceptual vein; recent silhouettes and caricatures of Jarry are enclosed by a circle, symbolizing unity and a metaphysical aura. The paintings are small, less than a foot square, and their surfaces are subtly varied from a luminous near-white to a diffused, absorptive gray. Images and inscriptions in the paintings are built up, revised, and obscured from over twenty glazes of titantium white and Mars black paint.

Concurrent with the exhibit at Locks Gallery, Thomas Chimes has a retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland. His work is in museums across the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently exhibited a panel portrait, Portrait of Alfred Jarry from 1974.

Accompanying the exhibit is a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by David Cohen.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com