April 19 - June 12, 2026
Russell Floersch - Blacklight | Matthew Feyld - Propositions | Paul Himmel - Needlepoints | Daniel Levine - Hold Fast
CLOSING RECEPTION, FRIDAY, JUNE 12, 2026, 2:30-6:30pm
WAITING ROOM
Russell Floersch - Blacklight
Recognizing what Painting can’t do is as important for me as what it can do.
Even as the field of Painting expands, I find it more urgent to court some of its inherent constraints. The intimate scale of the canvases I paint are intended to promote a greater one-to-one relationship between work and viewer. The humble objects the work incorporates reflect my interest in the force of the everyday.
The loop-like relief constructions that often appear on my canvases derive from components that record sound or image: nearly obsolete formats and devices like cassette-tape recorders or film cameras, and the internal spooled mechanisms that convey recording tape or film. Honoring loss plays a strong role in my work -- the loss of image in cropped and edited photographs, or the slow degradation of analog audio recordings, and with it, the loss of that capture, and memory of the event. Most works feature many layers of color --- an index of labor that might evoke the countless layers of paint that accumulate on an interior surface applied to protect a surface or alter its appearance.
Russell Floersch earned an MFA in Painting at the University at Buffalo in 1983 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to West Berlin at the Universität der Künste. After returning to the US, his first NYC exhibition was at the Civilian Warfare Gallery in 1986. From 1987-1992 Floersch exhibited at Stux Gallery. In 2010 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. From 2015 - 2020, he taught Drawing at City College, CUNY as Adjunct Assistant Professor, and in 2020 he taught at Hastings College, Nebraska as the Visiting Instructor of Painting. In 2022 Floersch moved home and studio to the Catskills in Roxbury, NY.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Matthew Feyld - Propositions
Matthew Feyld’s paintings function as concentrated examinations of surface, light, material, and colour. The tactile quality of the paintings encourage the viewer to move across the surfaces of the work, to get in close and examine the subtle structural qualities of the objects themselves.
Matthew Feyld, b. 1985, lives and works in Montreal, QC. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at venues including John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Geukens & De Vil, Antwerp, Knokke, Belgium; The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, Kiev, Ukraine; Lange & Pult Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland; Florit Florit, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; 57W57ARTS, New York, NY; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Pazo Fine Arts, Washington, DC; Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Birch Contemporary, Toronto, ON and Blouin Division Gallery in Montreal, QC.
AL’S OFFICE
Paul Himmel - Needlepoints
After abandoning his career as a photographer and becoming a psychotherapist in about 1970, Paul Himmel began to make needlepoints. When he was a child, his Ukrainian mother had sewn large needlepoint panels with designs based on vernacular landscape paintings. Now her son adapted the medium to reflect his lifelong interest in geometric design. He loved the garish colored yarns that he found in New York’s Garment District and was especially intrigued to discover that he could create three-dimensional forms by varying the tension of the thread. The format he arrived at subverted the functionalism of traditional needlepoint by leaving areas of scrim exposed.
Paul Himmel (1914-2009) was a New York photographer, largely known for personal reportage work done in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1954, he published Ballet in Action, with photographs of the New York City Ballet that captured the dancers’ movement. His photographs also appeared in MoMA’s popular and influential “Family of Man” exhibition (1955). He was married to the fashion photographer Lillian Bassman. Along with Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and many other prominent photographers, their careers were propelled by the legendary Russian émigré art director and teacher Alexey Brodovitch.
AL’S OFFICE
Daniel Levine - Hold Fast
Daniel Levine (New York City, 1959 - 2022) earned a BFA in 1981 and an MFA in 1983 from the University at Buffalo.
In addition to exhibiting his paintings in Europe and the United States since 1984, in 1989 he curated Amerikarma, World View in 1985, significant exhibitions that included several artists that would later achieve international success. At the time of his death, Levine was formulating another curatorial project, Another Log Cabin, Another Bird House, Another Ashtray.
He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1989 and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in 1989. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in venues including Paula Cooper, NY, The High Museum, Atlanta, GA, Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, TX, The Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, Guekens & De Vil, Antwerp, 303 Gallery, NY, and The Buffalo AKG Museum, Buffalo, NY. His paintings and works on paper are in the collections of the Panza Collection, Varese, Italy, The Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, The Buffalo AKG Museum, Buffalo, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art - Tucson, AZ, The Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, and numerous private collections in the United States and Europe. His exhibitions have been reviewed in such publications as ArtForum, Art in America, Artnews, and Arts Magazine, Artcritical, The New York Times, among others.
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