The Life of Things

MAY 26th - AUGUST 31st, 2020

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce our online exclusive exhibition, "The Life of Things" featuring paintings by 12 artists exploring ideas of space and place - the spaces that we inhabit, the things which surround us, and a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging.

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Domesticity is a recurring theme coupled with rigorous execution and a deep conceptual foundation. None of the artists simply depict things, or worlds they inhabit, but imagine, extemporize, embellish their subject matter in ways that conform to hopes and dreams.

The exhibition includes Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, Sarah Cain, Jay Davis, Nicole Eisenman, Jane Freilicher, Carla Klein, Orly Maiberg, linn meyers, Michal Rovner, and Jorge Tacla. All of them are painters, but not all of them use paint on canvas to make art. Butterly and Agee for instance work in clay but employ paint and painting techniques.

Meyers, a Washington, D.C. based artist, is showing in Los Angeles here for the first time. She paints space, literally, but it's also an interior world that envelops and hypnotizes the viewer, while Tacla is a history painter, taking us to real places under threat of destruction. For Davis, Cain, and Klein, and even Eisenman, spaces are inherently social, contested.

Michal Rovner is a painter with light. Her recent, narrative video installations created from customized, computer programs take us into the future, visually and technologically. For Rovner, an Israeli, space is already and always synonymous with identity, deeply layered.

Dipping canvas in buckets of diluted ink, Orly Maiberg creates panoramic compositions that appear chaotic at first, purely abstract landscapes and yet have a basis in studies of biology, environmental politics, and a tension between nature as both a home and threat to humanity -- small insect-like figures populate her pictures, alone, seemingly lost and vulnerable at the edge of vast and foreboding environments which resmeble topographic maps or panoramic scenes viewed from above. But life is born here from death, figuration from abstraction.

Jane Freilicher and Thordis Adalsteinsdottir adhere to documenting intimate personal space. Adalsteinsdottir paints interiors, or more correctly interiors of interiors. She looks inward into her own mind to paint intense, arresting, psychological portraits of herself and others, frequently women. Freilicher paints interiors looking outwards to a landscape beyond her New York apartment or home on the eastern end of Long Island.

The gallery is open by appointment Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am – 5 pm.

For more information please contact Rosie at director@shoshanawayne.com