NEW YORK, NY.- Harkawik announced their representation of Calliope Pavlides (b. 1998, Athens, Greece), John Seal (b. 1971, Seattle, WA), and Katarina Janečková Walshe (b. 1988, Bratislava, Slovakia).
Calliope Pavlides has quickly gained attention for her distinctive works on paper, layering oil and dry pastels, crayon and colored pencil to produce disquieting images of the quotidian and the uncanny. Her most recent project, Dovecote, follows the artist's meditation on the rituals of Greek Summer. Here she introduces an “easy realism” that was previously only glimpsed through an array of unconventional framing devices, portals, and projected spaces. Her tools allow her to manipulate texture like a sly magician, and her forceful rending of incompatible vantage points, birds eye views and first-person perspectives here give way to a more elegiac preponderance, one that underscores the poetry of architecture and the magic of spaces touched my a great many bodies in motion. The faces peering out from her drawings act like waypoints in the gulfs between antiquity and modernity, kitsch and utility, tradition and incident. Does timelessness have a chance today in a land whose romantic gaze is most frequently trained backward?
Born in Athens, Greece in 1998, Los Angeles based Calliope Pavlides graduated from RISD with a BFA in Painting in 2020. She has exhibited in group and solo shows throughout Greece and the United States, most recently with KYAN Project Space, Athens, De Boer Gallery, Los Angeles, Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles, and Harkawik, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artillery, Flaunt, and Bomb.
Working primarily in painting, John Seal's practice encompasses installation, sculpture and functional design, and is grounded in a phenomenological approach that illuminates the historically mutable role of the visual artist. Invested equally in abstract and representational traditions, the artist has recently focused on a series of mid-size canvases that distill some of the elaborate textuality of past projects into a more immediate format, employing a brand of painstaking realism that betrays both a remarkable technical pedigree and an indelible mark on current discourse. Seal chases the sublime with a wry and omnipotent remove, and his subjects are almost comically large, general, broad and universal. It is this investment in the material facticity of a painting, the problems contemporaneous to, but not innate of, the rise of visual culture, and the quixotic pleasures of looking that give his project enormous potency. His paintings produce the conditions of their own making, and fully own their undeniable and tautological beauty, asking more of us than seems possible. Seal will present "Double Landscapes" this Winter, his second solo and seventh collaboration with the gallery since 2013.
Born in Seattle, WA in 1971, Seal has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, including solo exhibitions with Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, 365 Mission, Los Angeles, König Galerie, Berlin, König Galerie, London, and Harkawik, New York. He studied at Bard College, University of Southern California, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Katarina Janečková Walshe works across media, employing paper, canvas, bedsheets and a wide array of markmaking tools to skewer received notions of authentic culture, gender norms, sexual expression, national pride, social progress, and age-appropriate behaviors. Her process is free-ranging, improvisational and fearless, and she uses her own sexuality, motherhood, and identity as a painter as characters in the scenes she envisions. Her critical attention and transgressive methodologies have most recently been trained on the fallacies of contemporary American life, a happy outgrowth of time spent in Texas, even as her relentless commitment to social justice and the transformative and cathartic potential for figurative painting remains free of geographical site or national character. Most recently, her pictures have been populated by women whose gendered, bountiful "mothering" has been pushed to absurd ends, whose bodies have become amalgamations of hypersexualized "cut-outs," and whose foils are most frequently an army of randy, proud, endearing and occasionally foolhardy bears. Janečková Walshe's first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first in New York, will take place this Spring.
Born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1988, Katarina Janečková Walshe has exhibited widely abroad, recently at Althuis Hofland, Amsterdam (2022 and 2020), Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp (2022), Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin (2020 and 2021) and Asia Art Center, Taipei (2021). Janečková Walshe is the subject of many texts, interviews and monographs, most recently, "Maternity Vacations," available for purchase on our website. Janečková Walshe studied in Slovakia and New York and currently lives and works in Corpus Christi, TX with her husband Robert and their two children, Alenka and Vida.
