BI-COASTAL ART STANDOUTS
MAY 2023
There was so much art to leave the house for this month on both coasts - from the art fairs and auctions in New York to gallery openings in LA - it’s a very busy Spring.
EMMA PREMPEH
Emma Prempeh, a British artist with Ghanian and Vincentian heritage, has only recently completed her MFA at the Royal College of Arts, but she has already picked up several awards and notable show appearances, including being named among Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries in 2019.
Through a series of new paintings featured at Frieze New York, personal spaces are brought to life in a warm, gauzy fashion. The home emerges as a theme across these works, through worn-in armchairs, bustling family kitchens, and cozy living rooms. The tonal properties of Prempeh's paintings evoke darkened earthly tones with a strong presence of blackness to project memories of events, people, and places that emphasize her appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation. Embedded within her works are hints of imitation gold leaf, representative of the exploration into the transitional journey between life and death. Over time, the material deteriorates, suggestive of the passing of time.
Prempeh occasionally also experiments with projected still and moving imagery to create painting installations that invite experiential and performative encounters with her work.
NAUDLINE PIERRE
Naudline Pierre’s paintings draw from fantasy and iconography to conjure alternate worlds. Swirling with jewel-toned texture, her works focus on ecstasy, devotion, and tenderness in epic scenes that generate space for rescue and healing. Pierre’s winged figures are enveloped in vast, horizonless landscapes, where they come together in acts of intimacy and salvation: they reach longingly outward toward each other, congregate, and embrace, emoting protection and care.
Her group of brand-new, stylized, characterful paintings is the artist’s attempt to insert her own point of view into traditional scenes of the male-dominated worlds of classical painting. Pierre's work is all about using the structures of Renaissance and Baroque painting to build an alternative universe in which an all-female cast of characters play out scenes of care-taking, confrontation, and entanglement. The artist made a splash with collectors at the Frieze fair: The whole booth of these bright, fluid works had sold out within a few hours of the fair’s opening.
Pierre was born in 1989 in Leominster, MA and received an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a B.F.A. from Andrews University, MI. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; ICA Miami, FL; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China.
YVETTE MAYORGA
Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Yvette Mayorga's works stopped everyone in their tracks at Nada New York. Her hot pink pieces explode out from the wall juxtaposing layers of piped acrylic paint that evoke cake icing with Rococo gold framing and details. As visually alluring and seductive as they are on first glance, the works hold layered critiques of immigration, first-generation experiences, income inequality, and surveillance in an age of unparalleled decadence and wealth. The longer you look, the more unnerving details become, like the slide in Voyage to the Pink Castle, seen here.
Mayorga's work links feminized labor and the aesthetics of celebration to colonial art history and racialized oppression through the guise of using pink as a weapon of mass destruction. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first solo museum exhibition is currently on view at the Momentary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through October, and she will open another exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in September.
WENDY PARK
Wendy Park's vibrant large-scale paintings of household objects are a reflection of her experience as a first-generation Korean American. In particular, Park represents her relationship between her parents and her experience with American culture through food objects and dishes.
In Army Soup (seen here), yellow Coors Light beer cans confront a can of Spam, chopped peppers, and Korean snacks on a table. While the painting is seemingly innocuous, it exudes the tensions between her Korean heritage and an American culture that prides itself on its homogenizing values. It is a loving reflection of her parents’ labor to make it possible to do what she does in life; the mixture of cultures in her paintings honor that sacrifice.
GRACE CARNEY
Referencing Japanese Shunga, Baroque and Renaissance painting, contemporary media, and her own body, abstract artist Grace Carney focuses on the gendered female body in society. In Carney’s pastel-colored abstractions, the artist builds and erases layers, a process she views as a metaphor for unearthing the body’s vulnerability. The vivid work lures audiences into a landscape that attends to the various histories of interpersonal and public oppression of women’s bodies.
Carney received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, and received her MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School in 2022. Carney was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022.
DANIELLE MCKINNEY
In her latest exhibition, Metamorphic, Danielle Mckinney creates narrative paintings that often focus on a solitary female protagonist in well-worn spaces and familiar nooks as incubators for transformation, places that allow the self to unfold, morph, and multiply. In these intimate portraits, Mckinney captures the figure immersed in various leisurely pursuits and moments of deep reflection.
In Shelter, featured here, a monarch butterfly crawls along the elegant crest of a woman's finger, resting in the blind spot of her contemplative gaze. Monarchs can be found throughout the artist's practice and operate as symbols of changeability, signifying the emerging transformations that rustle quietly in one's mind, fluttering just beneath the surface of perception.
With a background in photography, Mckinney paints with an acute awareness of the female gaze, using deeply colorful hues and nuanced details with cinematic effect.
Born in 1981 in Montgomery, Alabama, Danielle Mckinney completed her BFA at Atlanta College of Arts in 2005 and her MFA at Parsons School of Design in 2013. Her work is in private and public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and the Hessel Foundation Collection at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
GWEN O’NEIL
Gwen O’Neil is an abstract painter based in Los Angeles whose work invokes the rhythms of the natural world. In her latest paintings, O’Neil layers stippled brushstrokes in spiraling waves of color with a palette reminiscent of the fauvists and post impressionists along with inspiration drawn from the coastal beauty of California and Long Island.
O’Neil’s compositions can be read as cosmic diagrams: maps of LA’s back-canyon roads, migrating birds and spiraling eddies. There are patterns hidden in these forms, algorithms programmed into the natural world. Despite their cascading waves and whirlpools of color, O’Neil’s work induces a feeling of serenity. Her work is a visual respite from the digital overload of modern life, and a manifestation of nature’s underlying design.
Gwen received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. Her work is currently on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art in the group exhibition Color Fields.
BRIE RUAIS
In her most recent exhibition of new ceramic sculptures and ephemeral, site-specific work, Brie Ruais approaches a 130 lb. pile of clay (the equivalent of her weight) by kneeling and spreading the clay out with her palms in one long fluid movement. Merging the movements and weight of her body with hunks of clay, Ruais stomps, kicks, stretches, wedges, rakes, and pulls this earthy material into abstract, organic forms that serve as beguilingly beautiful records of her actions. Ruais’s projects begin with a set of instructions, which she carries out quickly, infusing the clay with the energy of her process. With heavily worked surfaces finished with richly colored glazes, her pieces recall landscapes, abstract paintings, and the contours of the body itself.
Born in 1982 in Southern California, Ruais earned her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY. Her work is in the permanent collections of Burger COLLECTION, Hong Kong; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, among others.
KARLA KLARIN
“Big Pink”, a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Karla Klarin, reveals a dusty pale pink theme throughout the ten canvasses on view. These architectural landscape paintings are connected to Klarin’s memory of a neighbor’s house and the ever changing transformation of the Los Angeles city skyline.
Her friend's home, which stuck out due to its distinct aesthetic against the otherwise earth-toned hues, set itself apart as a specifically Southern California modernist aesthetic, and one that was unabashedly female. Like Natalie’s house, Klarin’s works revel in their use of pink, integrating the color into the harsh geometry of the angular landscape and sprawling metropolis–-together they tell a story of Klarin’s own biography as a female artist in Los Angeles.
Born in 1953, Klarin received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1978. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Fisher Art Museum, USC, Los Angeles, CA, among others.
KWESI BOTCHWAY
Eighteen oil and acrylic paintings and an installation of orange wooden framed mirrors sourced from Accra, Ghana feature in Kwesi Botchway’s latest LA exhibition. The act of seeing becomes a material, geographic, and refracted meditation wherein both figure and audience are bound in a series of echoes, nearing infinity, creating an interesting vantage point. Each work centers on a domestic scene and a figure, or figures, whose back frames the canvas and whom the audience encounters as they look into a mirror. This relationship between plane and proximity, audience and figure, and the matter of sight permeates the works.
Of particular interest are Botchway’s figures themselves...They are all painted with his signature use of deep black undertones and winding purple brushstrokes, which rest atop the skin akin to tattoos. Additionally, Botchway's figures do not merely look back at the viewer or take an oppositional glance; rather, their domestic scenes and their eyes are positioned via an internal process in which the viewer is acknowledged through the direct gaze framed by a mirror. The structure of each portrait shows the mirror askew or in partial view allowing the canvas to hold a glimpse of an otherwise larger scene and thus a perceived peak rather than an objectifying presentation of someone's world.
Kwesi Botchway was born in 1994 in Accra, Ghana — where he continues to live and work. He is the founder of WorldFaze in Accra, a studio and residency space that focuses on supporting young local artists. He studied art at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra before enrolling at the Academy of Visual Arts in Frankfurt, Germany. His paintings are included in such public collections as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Vanhaerents Foundation, Belgium; the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.