Path of the Storm
April 15th - May 15th, 2021
Sunny NY is pleased to announce Path of the Storm, a group exhibition featuring Trudy Benson, Andrea Marie Breiling, Ryan Foerster, Muzae Sesay, Bill Saylor, and Tracy Thomason. The artists in this show are decidedly distinct, yet they are united by their unique path to abstraction. The works convey an interest in radical materiality, reimagined histories of gestural abstraction and mysterious, geometric painting. The resulting works are idiosyncratic; featuring an exciting combination of styles past and present.
Trudy Benson and Andrea Marie Breiling make highly expressive paintings with an ecstatic relationship to color and materiality, and introduce an aggressive physicality to the language of abstraction. Audiences are prone to reorient themselves to innumerable spatial and optical effects. Benson sprays, brushes on, and extrudes paint to create vivid grids, checkered rectangles and impasto lines. The artist masks off surfaces to reveal layered processes that are both playful and sophisticated. Breiling uses sprayed paint and acrylic to create heavily saturated surfaces of shimmering paint, swirling gestures and drips. The artist often works at large scale with complex palettes that burst with feverish energy and transcendence.
Bill Saylor and Ryan Foerster work in a variety of mediums to create near-visionary, unconventional works. Both artists mine their personal histories for iconography. Saylor came to recognition in the 90s. His mature work combines explosive, gestural abstraction with personal imagery on raw canvas. Fascinated by weather patterns, history and wildlife, his paintings bear relationships to industrial processes, notebook sketches, graffiti and even cave painting. Foerster is a lo-fi alchemist artist. Channeling Richard Tuttle, the artist transforms everyday materials into spontaneous works that are poetic, fragile and humorous. Foerster has made paintings from used Target shopping bags and sculptures using old hockey sticks and duct tape. The artist has also made photographic work using photosensitive paper outdoors, leaving it to collect sunshine, dirt, water and debris.
Tracy Thomason and Muzae Sesay create graphic, geometric abstract paintings with tight structures and bright color. Using inventive glyphs, negative space and irregular patterns, both artists make work that resemble childhood game boards, medieval illustrations, and even mandalas. Thomason uses paint and marble dust mixed into clay-like materials on linen to create powdery, dense abstractions. The artist is interested in paint as skin, asserting a feminist reading of materiality. Thomason’s recent paintings occupy territory between sculpture and painting, made using stone carving tools, knives and precisely drawn impasto lines. Sesay successfully crosses the bright color of Bob Thompson with the spatial depth of Al Held’s Abstract Illusionism. The artist is concerned with industrial architecture and domestic interiors, creating joyful paintings about space and light. His recent works are full of geometric windows, tables, stairs and pathways in bright multi-color hues.
Path of the Storm is a celebratory exhibition focusing on a group of six diverse artists whose contribution to abstraction questions and advances its complex legacy.
Sunny NY - 155 E. 2nd St. New York, NY 10009 - press.sunnygallery@gmail.com
April 15th - May 15th, 2021
Sunny NY is pleased to announce Path of the Storm, a group exhibition featuring Trudy Benson, Andrea Marie Breiling, Ryan Foerster, Muzae Sesay, Bill Saylor, and Tracy Thomason. The artists in this show are decidedly distinct, yet they are united by their unique path to abstraction. The works convey an interest in radical materiality, reimagined histories of gestural abstraction and mysterious, geometric painting. The resulting works are idiosyncratic; featuring an exciting combination of styles past and present.
Trudy Benson and Andrea Marie Breiling make highly expressive paintings with an ecstatic relationship to color and materiality, and introduce an aggressive physicality to the language of abstraction. Audiences are prone to reorient themselves to innumerable spatial and optical effects. Benson sprays, brushes on, and extrudes paint to create vivid grids, checkered rectangles and impasto lines. The artist masks off surfaces to reveal layered processes that are both playful and sophisticated. Breiling uses sprayed paint and acrylic to create heavily saturated surfaces of shimmering paint, swirling gestures and drips. The artist often works at large scale with complex palettes that burst with feverish energy and transcendence.
Bill Saylor and Ryan Foerster work in a variety of mediums to create near-visionary, unconventional works. Both artists mine their personal histories for iconography. Saylor came to recognition in the 90s. His mature work combines explosive, gestural abstraction with personal imagery on raw canvas. Fascinated by weather patterns, history and wildlife, his paintings bear relationships to industrial processes, notebook sketches, graffiti and even cave painting. Foerster is a lo-fi alchemist artist. Channeling Richard Tuttle, the artist transforms everyday materials into spontaneous works that are poetic, fragile and humorous. Foerster has made paintings from used Target shopping bags and sculptures using old hockey sticks and duct tape. The artist has also made photographic work using photosensitive paper outdoors, leaving it to collect sunshine, dirt, water and debris.
Tracy Thomason and Muzae Sesay create graphic, geometric abstract paintings with tight structures and bright color. Using inventive glyphs, negative space and irregular patterns, both artists make work that resemble childhood game boards, medieval illustrations, and even mandalas. Thomason uses paint and marble dust mixed into clay-like materials on linen to create powdery, dense abstractions. The artist is interested in paint as skin, asserting a feminist reading of materiality. Thomason’s recent paintings occupy territory between sculpture and painting, made using stone carving tools, knives and precisely drawn impasto lines. Sesay successfully crosses the bright color of Bob Thompson with the spatial depth of Al Held’s Abstract Illusionism. The artist is concerned with industrial architecture and domestic interiors, creating joyful paintings about space and light. His recent works are full of geometric windows, tables, stairs and pathways in bright multi-color hues.
Path of the Storm is a celebratory exhibition focusing on a group of six diverse artists whose contribution to abstraction questions and advances its complex legacy.
Sunny NY - 155 E. 2nd St. New York, NY 10009 - press.sunnygallery@gmail.com
SUNNY NY - 155 E 2nd St. New York, NY 10009