October 13 - December 6, 2024
Laura Vahlberg - Soft Filter | Howard Schwartzberg - Compass Bandage Paintings | Linus Schmidt - Borups Allé | Lesley Raeside | Yoella Razili - The Magic Boxes
CLOSING RECEPTION - FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2:30-6:30pm
WAITING ROOM
Laura Vahlberg - Soft Filter
Laura Vahlberg paints pictures that represent the everyday and mundane within the context of formal abstraction. She works on site in front of her chosen subject, nature acting as both reference material and active contributor. She plays both observer and participant, delving into the process as intuition and perception dictate the direction. All of the pieces in a scene at the beginning of a painting are identified democratically only as shape and color. As the picture progresses, the shapes and colors create their own order in service of the overall idea. Often the idea appears first as a formal construction, and then a narrative emerges. In this way an abstract experience happens within a representational field.
Laura Vahlberg's work has been exhibited around the U.S. and internationally (Australia, Los Angeles, New York, Alabama, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Virginia). She has studied with artists including Israel Hershberg, Elana Hagler, Ken Szmagaj, and Susan Jane Walp. She now lives in Roanoke, Virginia and received her Bachelors in Fine Arts at James Madison University.
AL’S OFFICE
Howard Schwartzberg - Compass Bandage Paintings
In the Bandage Paintings, the canvas is applied to paint that is sandwiched between a repurposed piece of wood, then hung on a wall. In these works the canvas becomes a protective covering. The process of applying canvas to wet paint documents the moment when paint meets canvas reversing their traditional roles, creating a textured surface of paint and textile. Refashioning the interactions between canvas and paint has been a consistent aspect of my work. The Bandage Paintings have generated multiple sub-series related to its process, including Compass Bandage Paintings, Sunken Bandage Paintings and Open Space Bandage Paintings.
The Compass Bandage Paintings are round pieces with a carved notch on the side. Made in pairs, the pieces are hung adjacent to each other with a two-inch space in between. Each piece can be rotated when installed, determining its direction and the position of the notches to vary the interaction within each pair. Each of the four pairs are made with complementary, primary and secondary colors; red/green, yellow/violet, orange/blue, and the inclusion of black/white.
Howard Schwartzberg was born in 1965 in Coney Island, Brooklyn. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and his Master’s in Education from the University of New England, Maine. Schwartzberg began showing work in 1990. He has been in several group shows in New York, including the Drawing Center and Stux Gallery. He has had solo exhibitions at Momenta Art, Silverstein Gallery, Dorsky Gallery and most recently at 57W57Arts in New York City and Private Public Gallery in Hudson NY. In 1999 the artist created “Surface”, a large environmental earthwork in Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY.
During his tenure as a New York City high school art teacher, Schwartzberg has developed art programs for disadvantaged children through out the five borrows. He also taught art to students in the largest high school in Queens, NY for the remaining ten years of his career. In 1999, Schwartzberg received the New York City Art Teachers Association/UFT Honorary Art Educators Award in the High School Category. After a twenty-year period of focusing his art making with education, in 2020, Schwartzberg retired from the New York City Public School System. In 2016, he started making his paintings once again and looks forward to exhibiting and sharing his work around the world.
AL’S OFFICE
Linus Schmidt - Borups Allé
The companion to the wonder of travel is the awkwardness and unfamiliarity of a new place and culture. When traveling, I find that photographing combats the strangeness and looming isolation that remains in my peripheral vision. I look for the inherent sameness in the arrangement of things. The aftereffects of the local inhabitants. Despite the cultural and architectural uniqueness, certain human habits remain the same. These sights are my greatest comfort.
Linus Schmidt is an artist who was born and raised in New York City. In 2024 he received his BFA in photography and related media from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Linus Schmidt’s work has been shown in group exhibitions, including Unseen Memory and Thresholds at the Museum at FIT.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Lesley Raeside
I use simple, geometric shapes centered in the foreground, often repeated in painting after painting. The repetition of form allows for the elements of color and light, surface and space, form and dispersion, to interact in subtle ways. My paintings are about energy and frequency. They are intuitive and at the same time, they are procedural.
Repetition is also analogous with the use of mantras to quiet the mind and direct us inward, potentially towards deeper states of consciousness. The paintings hold the space between me and the viewer; between energy and its potential for transmutation. Words, thoughts, memories and emotions have their limitations and can be influenced by our agendas, but there is a pure and unequivocal truth, an authenticity about energy that is absolute.
Lesley Raeside graduated from Glasgow School of Art, in her native Scotland, with a degree in Graphic Design. She began painting shortly after in a collective studio in the city’s east end and eventually became one of three founding members of Transmission, an artist-run gallery in Glasgow. She curated exhibitions and showed her own work, her first paintings, at Transmission. A decade after graduating as a design student, she won a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She moved to New York City afterward, to a studio on the Lower East Side, part of Empire State College’s Studio in New York City program. Her first solo exhibition, Four Paintings took place in 2019 at the National Exemplar Gallery in New York, and a second, Meditations, at the gallery’s Iowa location the following year. This is her second exhibition with 57W57Arts in New York City - the first, Muted Geometry, took place in 2023.
SHELF
Yoella Razili - The Magic Boxes
My work is a synthesis of visual experiences influenced by architecture, art, and design. I transform found objects with new forms and colors, while preserving their inherent history. Guided by minimalism and arte povera, I strive to balance opposing forces—resolving tension between surfaces, weights, scale, and color. My current series, which I began 10 years ago, explores a simple cube form. The surfaces are built from found wood and intuitively painted with acrylic, resulting in pieces that are both familiar and new. My work expands on man-made architectural structures, creating landscapes that are both tangible and magical.
Yoella Razili is a post-minimal artist based in Los Angeles, renowned for her contributions to the non-objective art movement. Her diverse body of work incorporates a variety of media, including found materials and paint, showcasing her innovative approach to artmaking. Born in Israel, Razili moved to the US to expand her art education, earning her Master of Fine Arts from Otis Art Institute in 1981. Since then, she has exhibited her work internationally, with shows in the USA, Israel, Korea, France, and Italy, earning recognition and acclaim in the global art community.
CHAIRS
Thomas Barger
Thomas Barger is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Barger is originally from a rural cattle farm in Illinois. Like many transplants his move to NYC was motivated by necessity. Barger came to New York in order to access his own identity at a distance from his rural, conservative, religious background. Amidst this new chosen environment, Barger’s work has been a process of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual exploration grounded in craft, narrative, and humor. Thomas Barger studied Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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