NEW YORK, NY.- Rachel Uffner Gallery recently began "Encounter: Charles Burchfield, Louisa Chase, Anna Jung Seo, Claude Lawrence, Ryan Mrozowski, Soumya Netrabile, Alice Neel, Laurie Nye, Norma Tanega" a group show by a multi-generational group of artists who use diverse approaches to nature and landscape in painting. The exhibition is curated by Augusto Arbizo and will continue through January 7th, 2023.
Artists encounter and experience the natural world as the site of contemplation and storytelling. They contend with landscape as a space rich with meaning and possibilities, from corporeal events to spiritual occurrences. Topography, light, nature, climate, the vicissitudes of time— and the consequence of human presence (or absence)—have inspired and challenged each of the painters featured in this exhibition. Recurring elements, motifs, and ideas can be found throughout—sun and moon, the horizon as periphery, location as memory—establishing observational and referential contextual signifiers for the viewer to use as a lens through which we can explore and navigate each place.
Charles Burchfield’s (1893–1967) large scale Lower Part of Sunburst (1960-63) and Alice Neel’s (1900–1984) rare landscape The Sea (1947) anchor the exhibition with depictions of the sun and moon. Soumya Netrabile’s (b. 1966) lush canvases picture terrains profuse with movement and transformation, such as in The Descent (2022), while visionary compositions by Louisa Chase (1951–2016) and Anna Jung Seo (b. 1964) hint at symbolist elements in nature. Known for their careers and backgrounds in music, Norma Tanega (1939–2019) and Claude Lawrence (b. 1944) improvise on visceral interpretations of shifting exterior worlds. Flora and fauna are distilled towards abstraction in optically charged works by Ryan Mrozowski (b. 1981), and in Laurie Nye’s (b. 1972) chromatically intoxicating Dianthus Dream (2022). From still and meditative, to more actively traversed, each landscape setting is presented as a site rich with narrative–open, sometimes playful, often sacred, and always manyfold.
Rachel Uffner Gallery is also presenting "The difference between Right and Wrong", a solo exhibition of new works by Brazilian-American artist Sacha Ingber. Ingber grew up navigating two different cultures with separate histories, social systems, and visual languages. Pulling inspiration from sources including Portuguese colonial architecture reminiscent of a family farmhouse in Brazil, and mass-produced industrial products ubiquitous to the American experience, Ingber presents sculptures which challenge the inherent binaries of established social conventions related to domesticity, identity, and education.
The exhibited works build upon Ingber’s innovative process of assemblage, combining found objects with traditional techniques of craft, mold-making, and Trompe-l’oeil. With materials ranging from urethane, textile, clay, plaster, wood, and caning, Ingber employs everyday iconography including visual symbols related to learning, articulating a tension between constraint and freedom.
In a series of low-relief wall sculptures Ingber incorporates oversized plastic notebook spirals, suggesting the form of journals or calendars. These singular objects balance layers of representational imagery – including household furniture, folded dinner napkins, dress forms and campfire flames – with strategically positioned areas of negative space. Considering the oppressive consequences of prescribed gender roles and indoctrination, Ingber questions hierarchies of information and the morality and values of institutionalized schooling.
This is further explored in works like Perdre - La différence entre le Bien et le Mal, a hybrid object, part school-house, part female torso, part empty vessel; Taxes 2021, a scaled-up recreation of a three-ring binder which displays the artist’s own tax returns; and works from Ingber’s Stolen Document series which are inspired by museum displays of illuminated manuscripts shown alongside reproductions of pages stolen from the original volumes. Each piece strikes an equilibrium between pictorial clarity and ambiguity, raising questions about perception and subjectivity, altered meanings, and authenticity.
As suggested by the exhibition title, Ingber is ultimately interested in exploring the space between dichotomic extremes through material interplay and experimentation. She models each piece from utilitarian objects yet removes the possibility of function in favor of symbolic potential. For Ingber, the process of artmaking is a method of survival, finding her own truths, and a way of establishing her own version of “right and wrong.”
Sacha Ingber (b. 1987, Rio de Janeiro) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013. Ingber has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013), the Vermont Studio Center (2010), and was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Foundation Studio Program Fellowship in 2018/19. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include One Direction, Vitrine London; The Word-Killer, Brennan & Griffin, New York; Shelves of Mist, Triumph Gallery, Chicago; and Lock Eyed, The Sunroom, Richmond, VA. She has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Casey Kaplan, NY; Hesse Flatow, NY; LVL3, Chicago; and PEANA projects in Monterrey, MX, to name a few.
