Under a previous gallery name, Ray Waterhouse and the New York presented an online selection of works by four artists working in abstraction: Danielle Frankenthal, Cheryl Goldsleger, Iris Kufert-Rivo, and Annina Roeschiesen. Modern Fine Art will continue to work with the artists.
All four artists strive to make the intangible fabric of our lives visible, whether that be the effects of color and light, cultural conditioning and upheaval, vibrational energies generated by human connection, or links between perception, thought, and vision. These frequencies are then translated to new visual languages, often in complex and striking ways. Each artist works in layers, building up pigments, marks, and structures to form their visions, creating interplays between the varied surfaces. Each work is distinct, but shares a similar focus on translation or transmutation, of rendering thought and discourse onto a material surface. Each piece is not only an aesthetic display, but a method of thinking through complicated concepts and rendering them comprehensible to all.
Danielle Frankethal's true subject matter is line and color. Made on clear layers of Acrylite, her works shift and dance with the movement of light, transforming to match the ambiance at different times of day. Shadows drift and expand as light moves across the surface, changing the Her works are made to mimic adult human vision and raise questions about the way atmosphere, color, and light alter our perceptions of reality and indeed shape the reality created by our minds. She seeks to reveal the cultural conditioning we all develop as we transition into adulthood.
Cheryl Goldsleger seeks to 'make the invisible visible.' Creating her pieces involves a meticulous process of building surfaces and layers that must be precisely removed to reveal the marks below. Through this process of layering, drawing, painting, and removal, her works slowly reveal their final forms. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of information systems, including Geographical Information Systems and historical maps, Goldsleger explores the social and physical forces enacted on us by our environs. Using topographical motifs and abstract forms, she probes our relationship to spaces and reveals how perspectives and vantage points inform and influence our interactions in the world and how a different view can change everything.
Iris Kufert-Rivo's most recent works respond to the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. Her three series, Structure, Ribbon, and Stripe, use layering of colors, textures, and forms to create tension and opposition. The intensity produced by these results mimics the strain and loss of the last three years, including the social isolation the artist experienced. In her most recent series, Structure, she responds to social upheaval and the ways it is always processed and reformulated. Using repeated square forms, her paintings explore not only the lines of her urban environment, but the constraints and construction of intellect and emotion during these ever-shifting times.
Annina Roescheisen creates delicately layered explorations of the undetectable forces which influence us emotionally and physically. Working on her pieces for hours at a time, sometimes whole days, layers begin to accumulate, each one inflected by Roescheisen's state at the time, imbued with both her physical and emotional presence. Her paintings can have numerous layers over which she draws elaborate, scrolling lines with a feather and ink. Her textures and layers of lines, dots, and color capture the patterns of our thoughts and feelings as well as mimicking the physicality of our existence, the ridges of the brain, the whorls of fingerprints, unique to every individual.
