RUSSELL FLOERSCH | Blacklight | WAITING ROOM
April 19 - May 22, 2026
I want to foster a slower and more necessary in-person encounter with Painting. 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 the loss of memory despite striving to preserve it. Earlier works used humble objects and everyday experiences as a starting point --- especially the evidence of painting as an index of labor in the way an interior surface might be altered by countless layers of paint that can accumulate over time.
Recognizing what Painting can’t do is as important for me as what it can do. I’ve always felt a responsibility to challenge conventions in Painting, but I seek subtle means in reaching that place. I think there are small gaps in Painting that others have opened but subsequently others have overlooked or failed to investigate further. Whenever possible, I try to seize on that potential vein and mine it. Some might characterize this as a minor field, but I like to believe the terrain can yield great discovery.
In 1983, I earned an MFA in Painting at the University at Buffalo, and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to West Berlin at the Universität der Künste. I returned to the US in1984, and had my first NYC exhibition at Civilian Warfare Gallery in 1986. From 1987-1992 I exhibited at Stux Gallery. In 2010 I was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. From 2015 - 2020, I was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Drawing at City College, CUNY. In 2020 I traveled to Nebraska to teach as the Visiting Instructor of Painting at Hastings College, and returned to NYC in mid 2021. In 2022 I moved home and studio to the Catskills in Roxbury, NY.
RUSSELL FLOERSCH | FOUR D | AL’S OFFICE
June 2 - July 26, 2024
The three new pegboard works evolved from a long-running practice of altering household retail packaging kept after a product was consumed. These works extend an interest in absence, or an attempt to reconstruct or reimagine what’s missing. Earlier work from the 1990’s used found edited photographs with missing physical and visual information. This perforated material is associated with display of retail products, packaged in hyper-designed formats to get our attention and to associate a product with a familiar design and color scheme. Although many formats of metal hooks are used to support, hold, and present these products, I preferred to craft the hooks in wood or wire, often painting them to key to the objects. I have never paired the two elements to avoid the obvious association, but wanted the pegboard support to be evoked/implied. In using masonite pegboard as a starting point and painting support, it’s the trappings of the retail display, and the packaged products, that are absent. These works embody a personal tendency to locate connections to past work, and to combine past with present and the possible future.
This is Russell Floersch’s third show with 57W57 ARTS. He was a 1983-84 Fulbright Fellow to West Berlin, and was represented by Civilian Warfare Gallery and Stux Gallery. He was a 1996 NYFA Grant recipient and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2010. He taught at City College/CUNY and Hastings College, and has recently moved his studio to the Catskills.
WAITING ROOM + PROJECT SPACE
RUSSELL FLOERSCH | Two things together
On view: March 7 - April 18, 2019
NEW YORK – 57W57Arts is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Russell Floersch, which will span both our Waiting Room and Project Space galleries. Melanie’s Office will feature a dynamic pairing of works by Letitia Quesenberry and Rolf Siegenthaler. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, March 7th, and the exhibitions will be on view to the public through April 19th.
Many of the works in Russell Floersch’s “Two things together” are made from discarded packaging that once presented and housed everyday retail objects, as well as used plastic cups and foam supermarket food trays. Other material components include un-stretched canvas and felt, remnants from the studio, or found pieces discarded by other artists. Some works are paired in an effort to create a kind of station, installed to investigate the interactions of two discrete works, seen as one. Some of the combinations are produced by the overcrowding of materials in the artist’s studio, and some are the result of comments made by colleagues during studio visits or by the positive reactions to Instagram postings that capture the studio view of a group of works in-progress. For the past 25 years Floersch has engaged in an ongoing investigation honoring loss in found photographs. These photos occasionally appear in this group of work, and have been instrumental in the artist’s thematic use of materials typically ignored or thrown away.
Russell Floersch received his BFA from Buffalo State College and his MFA in painting from the University of Buffalo, SUNY. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 1983 he travelled to West Germany on a Fullbright Fellowship. Floersch’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Elizabeth Stone Harper Gallery at Presbyterian College, Kathryn Markel Gallery, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Galerie oqbo (Berlin) and Pavilhao Branco – Museu da Cidade (Lisbon). Solo exhibitions include “Field Painting” and “New Work” at Stux Gallery; “Hella” and “from Denim” at Rooster Gallery; and “Unseen”, Floersch’s first one-person exhibition with 57W57Arts back in 2015.
MAIN GALLERY + WAITING ROOM
RUSSELL FLOERSCH | Unseen
On view: November 5 - December 18, 2015
57W57Arts is pleased to present “Unseen,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Russell Floersch. The title owes some of its meaning to several works that were begun twenty years ago and never exhibited. In our Waiting Room project space, Floersch shows for the first time, a group of small canvasses he characterizes as Reconstructions. Although most of these were begun in 1997, many have been completed in the last few years. They combine found photo fragments that are taped to the surface of small abstractions. Floersch uses a flat paint meant to evoke humble wall surfaces, and typically reworks paintings for several yearspartly out of a restless search, and because he identifies with what Chantal Akerman might have meant by characterizing repetitive everyday acts and gestures as a “dailiness.” The Reconstructions share a pictorial commonality: a pair of cropped figures who make contact through their hands. Their titles are all prefaced with this thematic description: “Clasp.” Floersch strives for a naturalness in the final state of the workas if the painting and its surface were something you might encounter in your everydayespecially as it relates to the buildup of paint through repeated application by a tradesperson covering a surface simply to protect it or introduce a different color.
In the Main Gallery of 57W57Arts, the focus shifts to more current work. Throughout this group, the repeated layering of thin applications of the same color results in a blanketlike surface, the small relief elements and their sharper features often obscured. “The works bear the accretion of many layers of paint, built up to become an index of the span of time, of memory, and of the act of making that each of them seeks to preserve. The objects of this makerly process become transformed in the process, as they oscillate in a twilight space between thing and image.” (Beth E. Wilson, “from Denim,” exhibition essay for Rooster Gallery, NY, April 2014)
Since the mid1980’s Floersch has been interested in painting as labor; responding to and collaborating with objects and images, often of unknown authorship; and the notion of specific interior place as a subset of landscape.
Russell Floersch is represented by Rooster Gallery, NY.