COOL & COLLECTED ‘21
Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present the Cool & Collected ’21 exhibition. This exhibition focuses on three gallery artists whose work hits our senses in all the right ways and tickles our fancy with its combination of materials, exuberant color, and spot-on hip vibes.
Gabe Brown says, “art is like magic, an illusion created by the force of humanity”. Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed, everyday events such as conversations between birds, forces that drive water, or the cellular structure of plant life are the beginnings of the reality she invents in her paintings. The concerns that arise from this process reveal themselves as subversive dualities existing in both the natural world and the man-made. When considering something in a new context, having unearthed the intrigue that lies just beneath the surface of the seemingly simple, the original meaning is altered and brought to a new level of consciousness, creating metaphor. In this way, the artist can see and show that the natural world is not unlike our own man-made realm, an alternate universe filled with an active power to recognize desire, temptation, and frailty. Brown’s paintings aim to create a secret recipe for an inner landscape of the human condition: narrative vignettes that are both alluring and mysterious. Nature and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and at times super reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself.
Gabe Brown has been represented by the gallery since 2011. The artist has been honored with numerous fellowships and residencies including New York Foundation for the Arts and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY, and Saltonstall Arts Colony, Ithaca, NY. Gabe Brown earned her MFA from the University of California, Davis, CA, a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY. She also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME and Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, NY. The artist lives and works in Kingston, NY.
Margaret Lanzetta’s abstract paintings use motifs drawn from numerous multicultural sources such as Buddhism, ‘60s pop culture, nature and contemporary industry. She has traveled the world gathering images and employs a lexicon of motifs to explore larger issues of language, spirituality, and cultural migration. Through painting, photography, and printmaking, she melds the mechanically generated and hand wrought. Often, digitally manipulated photographs of patterns are cut into stencils and silkscreened on canvases or paper. Influenced by artists such as Andy Warhol, Philip Taaffe and Yayoi Kusama, Lanzetta explores the power in the use of seriality. Margaret Lanzetta’s surfaces are rich and tactile. Layers of oil and enamel paint are used fluidly; paint is pushed through porous silkscreens building the composition and layering meaning through the process. Her enduring interest in saturated color is evident in all her work, and the color choices are weighted with symbolic and cultural content. Lanzetta has been represented by the gallery since 2006.
Margaret Lanzetta exhibits widely in the US and internationally including in India, Thailand, Singapore, Morocco, Japan. She is the recipient of an Inaugural Senior Fulbright Global Fellowship (India, Singapore, Thailand), Abbey Fellowship in Painting, Rome, Italy, Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (India, Syria), and was awarded residencies with INSTINC Art Residence, Singapore, Greenwich House Pottery, Greenwich, New York, MacDowell Art Colony Residency, to name a few. The artist was commissioned for a major permanent Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City subway system (Norwood Avenue, Brooklyn, NY). Her work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the British Museum, London. Margaret Lanzetta received her MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. She lives and works in New York, NY.
Jill Parisi is a masterful printmaker who uses many methods and materials to create flora and fauna of imaginary ecosystems. Like a jazz musician, she is riffing on nature, taking colors, structures, etc. from a variety of species and places, and reconfiguring them in novel ways. Much of her work reacts to viewer proximity and airflow that ever so slightly animates the pieces. An observant viewer is rewarded with remarkably detailed patterns or with the discovery of other smaller and more delicate “species” hidden beneath the first layer. Materials such as translucent tissue-weight papers, feathers, or glass inform these fantastic and ephemeral botanical species. Parisi’s drawings, prints, and sculptures have also been starting points for fabrication in various other durable materials. Jill Parisi has been represented by the gallery since 2011.
Jill Parisi’s work has been exhibited widely including in International Print Center New York’s New Prints exhibitions, The Krakow Printmaking Triennials (2012, 2015), the International Print Network’s Graphically Extended exhibition in Oldenburg (2013), the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville 2016, and at Medjeback, in Falun, Sweden. Her work is in various private and public collections in Italy, China, Portugal, and others including University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Iowa City, IA, Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health, New York, NY, New York University Langone Health, New York, NY. She completed public art commissions for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts for Transit program in 2012, and for DC Government Services in 2016. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books in 2005. Parisi earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Painting and a Master of Fine Arts Printmaking at the State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY. She lives and works in New York State.
Please contact Kenise Barnes, director: Kenise@kbfa.com with inquires or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.
