NEW YORK, NY.- Friedrichs Pontone announced the opening of their summer exhibition, showcasing a selection of works from across the gallery's roster. The Summer Show brings together exceptional new and established talent from the US, UK, Canada, South Korea and Estonia, blending together contemporary voices in abstraction, figuration and mixed media installation.
Born in 1983, Chris Rivers is a self taught artist from Manchester, England. His large and dramatic oil paintings are bold, abstract displays of charged colour and fine, surrealistic detail. Not everything is as it first seems in these worlds. Soft light filters through overlaying mists of complimentary tones, gradually swelling with dramatic saturated colour before receding into the image.
Estonian artist Kristi Kongi makes paintings and site-specific installations. Her work is rooted in a formal exploration of light, colour and space, initiated by her memories of personally significant landscapes and their emotional associations. On first encountering these pieces, one is struck by an intense level of almost psychedelic colour. The pictures are highly structured compositions of saturated colour fields and curved abstract shapes, alluding to spatial divisions, contours and horizons of landscape.
Heather Horton, takes us into a submerged water-world of refracted light through which a young woman swims, floats or glides. Our viewpoint is also underwater; we too inhabit this amniotic space. Horton paints with great subtlety, paying painstaking attention to the optical effects of the medium. Her palette is necessarily cool, with occasional small flashes of warmer reds and earths deployed as accents amongst the dominant cerulean blues, turquoises and. aqueous blue-greens. Horton demonstrates an accomplished mastery of technique in her evocation of saturated, luminous colour and her nuanced response to painting the human body.
For Richard Harrison, his abstract landscapes are rich in colour and texture with generous lashings of paint, which ebb and flow on the canvas reflecting turbulence and often violent upheaval. Harrison’s paintings are awesome in scale; their content exaggerated by the vigorous and robust handling of voluminous layers of paint, adeptly manipulated to create a dynamic expression of form and colour which resonate all over the canvas, thus underpinning the powerful emotional and visionary themes ever present in the artist’s compositions. Harrison strives for an intensely uncompromising and powerful effect, which he describes as ’no half measures’.
In Choi Soowhan’s work, we see both the natural and manmade, where the patterns and symmetrical rhythms of the human eye are closely mirrored with the elaborate curves of ornate Rococo frames, both rendered in meticulous detail through his highly skilled process of image making. We see frothing seascapes, alive with energetic light, contrast with still woodland scenes, where dappled sun and deep shadow show how the artist utilises the contrast of light and dark to encapsulate dynamic space and time. These scenes are dramatically monochrome, which lends them a dark and brooding cast, they are imbued with a level of intensity and commitment that commands attention and loads the subject with significance.
Brooklyn-based painter, Joseph Parra, examines how desire is shaped by digital culture, fusing traditional painterly discipline with the visual logic of contemporary image-making. His canvases are built from squeezed acrylic, applied directly from the tube to create pixel-like surfaces where muscular male forms emerge against vast skies. At once sculptural and surreal, these bodies hover between the sensual and the mediated, inviting reflection on how intimacy and representation are refracted through screens. His works are less depictions than provocations, asking how we see, and how desire itself is constructed, in an era saturated with imagery.
Together, these artists demonstrate how colour and technique create an illusion of depth, transforming light into form and evoking memory and emotion. Across the exhibition, each artist offers a distinct way of seeing, challenging our perceptions of space, form and our understanding of the world around us. Shaping how we look, what we feel and ultimately what we see.
