PORTLAND, OR.- Adams and Ollman returns to the Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles, where the gallery will present established and emerging artists emphasizing cross-generational conversations. Since its founding in 2013, the gallery has prioritized the unique contributions of women artists and those working far from the mainstream, with a focus on both contemporary and historical works. Our presentation for the Felix Art Fair will include key works by Katherine Bradford, Mariel Capanna, Peter Gallo, Alfred Jensen, Nao Kikuchi, Kinke Kooi, Tomoya Matsuzaki, Ryan McLaughlin, Marlon Mullen, Joan Nelson, Bethann Parker, and Ralph Pugay.
The figures in Katherine Bradford's (b. 1942, New York, NY; lives and works in New York, NY and Brunswick, ME) paintings are inextricable from their surroundings, as if dreamed to life by the bodies of water, night skies, or fields of color that surround them. The connection and contrast between figure and field offer hints of narrative, feeling, and subject matter, drawing in the viewer to consider gender, politics, and sexuality, as well as concerns around color and form. The archetypal figures—mothers, dreamers, superheroes—that appear throughout Bradford's work allow the viewer to consider humanity in all of its faults and beauty, comedy and tragedy, joy and pain.
Mariel Capanna's (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in Swarthmore, PA) paintings might be best understood as an exercise in remembering, a meditation on time, and a reflection of loss and longing. Her painting process is guided by self-imposed time constraints. She paints in real time as she watches a moving image—sometimes a film, other times a slideshow or video—capturing an object, a color, a feeling as it comes into view. Marked by dense accumulations of vibrant color, impasto paint, and gestural marks, each work contains allusions to the images and notations that represent the iconography of the American road trip: streams, seas, fences, patches of grass, flowering bushes, sun hats, palm fronds, meadows, mountains, sand banks, and birthday cakes. Within each canvas, shifting views glimpsed through multiple car windows and camera lenses are condensed into the picture plane, allowing the long road, seasonal changes, wide-ranging activities and encounters, and myriad places to collapse into a single image.
Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT; lives and works in Hyde Park, VT) creates what critics have termed "grunge arte povera"—layered compositions across painting, collage, sculpture, and drawing, which transform discarded materials into profound meditations on time, language, and the human condition. Gallo's aesthetic is anarchic and anti-establishment in its play with text and materials, repurposing meaning to turn authority on its head—a form of cultural resistance that challenges both artistic conventions and broader sociopolitical structures.
Alfred Jensen's (b. 1903, Guatemala City, Guatemala; d. 1981, Livingston, NJ) painting "Equality for All No. 1" (1972), contains a checkerboard of bright impasto colors with hieroglyphic symbols, some connected with an overlaid diagrammatic line. Driven to give form to a wide range of systems and beliefs, including philosophies of mathematics, science, and Goethe's theory of color, Jensen mapped out a universe of thought and interconnectedness across each panel. The colors the artist used were not simply descriptive, but rather possessed their own power, meaning, and universal truth.
Nao Kikuchi (b. 1988, Tochigi, Japan; lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany) isolates elements from the built environment into abstract and stylized architectural glyphs or remnants. Her small-scale ceramic works reference her own memories and experiences of extant places, such as the shape of a room, a tile floor, a staircase, or a cloister of windows. Complex layers of color, texture, and referential form reinterpret and renegotiate the artist's experience of the urban landscape as "a way of marking my physical presence, as if pinning my footsteps onto a map."
Since the 1980s, Kinke Kooi's (b. 1961, Leeuwarden, NL; lives and works in Arnhem, NL) works on paper have engaged with themes of gender, connection, and notions of the "other." She meticulously renders clamshells, pearls, flowers, seedpods, fleshy folds, and breasts in shades of pastel pinks, purples, and reds or striking yellows and greens with ornate and florid detail. In her intricate, inventive paintings and drawings, which might be read as an anthropomorphic garden, multi-faceted feminism is woven together with a seductive, sinewy line that blurs and merges inside and outside, convex and concave, surface and depth, ornament and function, emotional and verbal, high and low, flora and fauna.
Tomoya Matsuzaki's (b. 1977, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan; lives and works in London, England) works on paper and paintings live between two- and three-dimensional work, as well as figuration and abstraction. Muted tones of pastel and sensitive mark-making on found paper bags loosely depict a constellation or landscape. Matsuzaki's paintings include objects found while "mudlarking," searching for historical relics along the banks of London's River Thames.
Ryan McLaughlin (b. 1981, Worcester, MA, where he continues to live and work) paints and stencils fragments of letters, words, and symbols onto his canvases, often referencing found text from advertisements or signs. Toggling between subjective gestures and common signifiers with more fixed meanings, McLaughlin's disparate and decontextualized marks come together to trouble the line between legibility and illegibility.
Marlon Mullen (b. 1963, Richmond, CA; lives in Rodeo, CA and works in Richmond, CA) creates paintings characterized by graphic lines, bold color, and a uniquely rigorous approach to organizing the picture plane into innovative compositions. In these dense and tactile works, language and other loosely recognizable signs materialize and then dissolve as he translates found images, often from art magazines such as Artforum and Frieze, into complex abstractions that defamiliarize ubiquitous art-world ephemera.
Joan Nelson (b. 1958, El Segundo, CA; lives and works in Stamford, NY) is known for her ongoing exploration of landscape painting rooted in an engagement with feminism, spiritualism, science fiction, and environmentalism. Her works depict fantastical vistas filled with atmospheric and geological phenomena—volcanic explosions, shimmering wetlands, crepuscular rays, ethereal cloudscapes, mist-shrouded mountains, and ancient, entangled trees. Nelson spins these motifs into imagined worlds—utopias that hold true to the word's literal translation of "no place." The broad range of pictorial styles and perspectives in Nelson's work stems from her deep engagement with how landscapes have been represented across time. She references a wide range of paintings, etchings, exoticized renderings of foreign territories depicted in historical geography books, and even amateur travel videos, weaving these varied influences into her work. Particularly generative are the grandiose, imperial visions of Romantic landscape painters like Thomas Moran, Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt. Nelson exposes their narratives of conquest and extraction, reframing them through a feminist and ecological lens.
Bethann Parker (b. 1984; lives in Saylorsburg, PA and works in Easton, PA) makes exquisitely detailed paintings that depict a spiritual and animistic landscape. Parker's painting technique resembles embroidery stitching and pays homage to her mother's craft, as well as the artist's interest in antique textiles.
Drawing inspiration from popular culture and observations of everyday life, Ralph Pugay (b. 1983 in Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) creates raucous and irreverent drawings that ask the viewer to imagine a variety of pictorial "what-ifs." Pugay's propositions are the result of the artist's careful study of the human condition—particularly with regard to religion, specifically Catholicism, and history; his curiosity with contemporary culture as filtered through TikTok and other social media; and his critical engagement with ideas of class, race, gender, and queer culture. Popular trends, viral news stories, consumer fads, and all other manner of social phenomena are poignantly examined with great clarity and humor, locating moments of tension, humor, and poignancy in the collective unconscious.
