September 21 - October 24, 2025
Leslie Roberts - I Will Console You With Language | Susanne Stähli - Just color | Ingunn Fjóla Ingþórsdóttir - Woven Light, Painted Depths | Barbara Laube - Kindling a Moonlit Sun | Audrey Stone - Shelved
OPENING RECEPTION, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2025, 1-4pm
WAITING ROOM
Leslie Roberts - I Will Console You With Language
Text messages, titles of books, signs and ads read on subway trips, image descriptions from social media, email subject lines: these are some lists that, in these paintings, are diagrammed into color and line. I examine the flood of information surrounding us and record words that typically go unnoticed. Then I map handwritten words into forms I couldn’t otherwise invent, applying self-devised rules. Simple systems yield unexpected color, in formations that are pattern-like but satisfyingly irregular. I record the minutiae of ordinary life in search of extraordinary visual experience.
Leslie Roberts makes paintings driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has exhibited in the US and abroad, at galleries including Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, 57W57Arts, Markel Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); and the Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland). She received grants from the Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations in 2024. Residencies include Yaddo, Dora Maar House, Ucross, Ragdale, Willapa Bay AIR, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Skowhegan. Roberts holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College. She is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
AL’S OFFICE
Susanne Stähli - Just color
I am interested in the perception and effect of color.
The question of the connection between the materiality of paint and its sensory appearance leads to different series of painterly works on paper and canvas. The range of media extends from impasto oil painting and glazing acrylics to ink works on paper in which the watery, flowing properties of the paint can be vividly experienced.
The relationship between color, light and space led my work to site-specific installations made of colored foils on glass panes or colored glass for art in architecture works. The incident, non-static daylight creates a permanently changing atmosphere. For me a characteristic of color in general.
In Just color I will show some small works on canvas painted in thin translucent layers of acrylic paint. By leading the color from a light transparency to dense concentration, I create a chromatic space, in the depth of which lively tensions unfold between the many shades, rising to the surface as a polyphonic chromatic sound and diffusing into the surrounding space.
Susanne Stähli was born in Munich, Germany, studied painting and art therapy at FH Ottersberg/near Bremen, 2006 artist in residence at the University Witten/Herdecke, since 2006 teaching art at UWH, since 1988 regular national and international exhibitions, works in private and public collections (Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, Clemens-Sels-Museum Neuss, Märkisches Museum Witten, Emschertal-Museum Herne, Werner-Richard-Dr.Carl-Dörken Stiftung), art in architecture for private and public spaces
AL’S OFFICE
Ingunn Fjóla Ingþórsdóttir - Woven Light, Painted Depths
Ingunn Fjóla Ingþórsdóttir (b. 1976) is an Icelandic artist based in Denmark. Her work has been exhibited widely across Iceland, Denmark, Germany and the United States and can be found in many private and public art collections in Iceland. Recent solo exhibitions include The Only Constant is Change at the National Gallery of Iceland and You are the Input at LÁ Art Museum in Hveragerði. In 2022, Ingunn recieved the Guðmunda S. Kristinsdóttir Art Award for Outstanding Female Artists in Iceland. Ingunn Fjóla graduated with an MA degree in Fine Art from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2017 and a BA degree in Fine Art from the same institution in 2007. She also holds a BA degree in Art History from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, received in 2002. Ingunn works mainly in painting, weaving and installations.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Barbara Laube - Kindling a Moonlit Sun
these works are a way of repairing, an offering and a form of prayer
they are about questioning and the acceptance of not knowing
they teach me and I follow
they reflect my inner and outer life
I grew up the daughter of an airline pilot
I contrast thick oil paint of earth and ground
with thin washes of air and sky
the paintings are alive and ever changing
checkered farmland as seen from the air
facets of a loved one’s psyche
orbs in the rain forest with a shaman
visions of finished paintings
the view outside my studio window
unprimed linen reinforcing their transience
they are an exhalation of ego, leaving a soft breath
sometimes not so soft
Barbara Laube is largely self-taught. She has studied in Italy, France, and Germany. She also had the good fortune to study in New York with Joop Sanders, a founding member, along with Willem de Kooning and Milton Resnick, of the American Abstract Expressionist group. She has studied at Pratt Institute, The New York Studio School, and The School of Visual Arts.
Laube’s paintings have been featured in shows in France, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington State. Among these exhibitions are Analog Diary in Beacon, New York; Zurcher Gallery, NY; New York Artists Equity Gallery, New York; The Painting Center, New York; M. David & Co., Brooklyn; David Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn; Life on Mars, Brooklyn; Cheryl Hazan Gallery, New York; Wave Hill House, Bronx; Kleinert/James Gallery, Woodstock, New York; Goldscopophilia Gallery, New Jersey; Pierro Gallery, New Jersey; The Hope Horn Gallery, The University of Scranton, Pennsylvania; Runnells Gallery, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico; and Long Island University, C.W.Post Campus, New York. Laube lives and works in Riverdale, New York.
SHELF
Audrey Stone - Shelved
I started making the tape balls about seven years ago after a conversation in which Ellen Hackl Fagan suggested I take a more intentional approach to the castoff tape accumulating in my studio.
Just as I often start my paintings in the center, the balls start at the center with a single used piece of tape that gets repeatedly wrapped by subsequent pieces, very much like a rubber-band ball. If you sliced one open, it would likely resemble the rings of a tree.
The balls are markers of time. Each is the product of a year's worth of painting – or taping for painting. I start a new ball each September, the start of the school year, which even to my adult self feels like a new beginning. The balls also begin (and end) close to the date of Rosh Hashanah, which literally means the 'head of the year,’ and when held in hands, the balls have the weight of a child’s head. And in some way they are the contents of my own head: a record of everything I’ve thought in the studio over the course of a year.
Audrey Stone is an abstract painter whose work is informed by light and color. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US, as well as in Europe and Asia. She received her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from Pratt Institute, both in painting. A native New Yorker, Stone lives and works in Brooklyn.
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