Armory Show 2022 - Viewing Room

Interacting with increasingly segmented, abstract backgrounds, the figures in Bradford's recent paintings address constructed social roles, like the archetypical figure of the mother, through incongruous, dream-like scenes. Bradford creates her figures with elementary painterly marks, often lacking detail or facial features that would allow to assign a gender identity. Although charged with social interactions shifting between domination and agency, her groups of people exist in collective fluidity, in an intangible atmosphere where bodies interweave and dissolve.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) lives and works in New York. She started painting at the age of thirty while living in Maine and was among the group of artists who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1980s. Her work is currently presented in the survey exhibition Flying Woman : The Paintings of Katherine Bradford at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, until 11 September 2022. Her work is included in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and the Portland Museum of Art, ME.

Rochelle Feinstein (b. 1947) lives and works in New York. A major survey exhibition of Feinstein’s work was shown at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2016), and subsequently travelled to Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2017), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2018-2019). Past solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2012). The artist was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is part of the public collections of Lenbachhaus, Munich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Feinstein is Professor Emerita of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University.

Xylor Jane’s process avoids rigor as an end in itself to pursue the “balance between effort and effect” that Josef Albers sought for. The visual impact of her paintings is not only achieved by their meticulous manufacture but by the use of the subtle movement that color and paint create on the surface of the canvas, engaging the viewer in a micro-contemplation.

Ridgerunner is a line test oriented on the diagonal that is applied to a very blue ground based on a photograph of a sky taken by David Horvitz in 2008. The painted lines start with green as a square centred on a rectangle and are woven with rainbow colours in alternating symmetry.

Xylor Jane (b.1963, Long Beach, CA) lives and works in Greenfield, MA. She was recently featured in the exhibition A Spirit of Disruption presented by San Francisco Art Institute in celebration of their 150th anniversary. The artist has had solo exhibitions at University Museum of Contemporary Art, Amherst (2019) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2014). Jane participated in group shows at The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Boston University Art Gallery, Boston and DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens among others. Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the Brooklyn Rail. Xylor Jane: Notebooks was published in 2019 and features drawings from the last twenty years with essays by John Yau and Em Rooney.

The American / German artist Nick Mauss has formed his work through a finely tuned sensory register, with drawing at the centre of a praxis which otherwise eludes all simple categorizations. Expanding the medium of drawing through multiple registers at the same time, Mauss’ approach to drawing fuses peripatetically to other possible formats, including sculpture, publications, the format of the exhibition, and writing.

In Nick Mauss’ ceramic wall works, the preliminary qualities of a sketch are translated into a constructed material object, creating a passage between anticipation and full realization, invention and variation. They are produced at Gatti, Faenza, known for their collaboration with exponents of the Futurist movement.

Nick Mauss (b. 1980) contributes this year as an invited artist to the survey exhibition of Christian Bérard at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. He recently had a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (2020) and was featured in the exhibition Les Flammes. L’âge de la céramique at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, curated by Anne Dressen (2021). His work was part of Transcorporealities at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019). He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York (2018), Triennale di Milano and Torre Velasca, Milan (2018) and at the Serralves Museum, Porto (2017) with an accompanying catalogue.

Kianja Strobert’s recent series of works presents the process, the raw material, the motivations and the goal simultaneously, devoid of any hierarchy. Strobert’s bench-shaped sculpture is covered with a color that evokes pewter, a metal primarily used for decorative metal items and tableware since ancient times. The work shares the context of other products of consumption, suggested by the presence of utensils, objects and themes. Paired against bright colors and alluring imagery, the relentless tension here is the cannibalistic tie between the product and its means of production.

Strobert’s recent works propose an attitude toward finish, in which the painter does not disguise the means of arriving at the final work. From ideation to creation, we are let into the artist as a maker in the studio, and a filter of our world.

Kianja Strobert (b. 1980) lives and works in Hudson, NY. Last year, she had a solo exhibition at Art OMI in Ghent, NY (2021). Past solo exhibitions include The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California. Group exhibitions include Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City and The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. The artist received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University.

Exploring the history, practice, and circulation of painting as his subject, Cheyney Thompson methodically deconstructs how a work is created, revealing historically established perspective systems, subject matters, colour codes, and post-studio circulation within a socio-economic context.

Cheyney Thompson’s new series of Displacement paintings posits each canvas’s ground as a touch-sensitive surface. The works adopt a uniform structure of fivemillimeter square black marks painted in a gridded pattern atop a white ground. Before the paint is dry, Thompson deploys an assortment of custom silicone tools against the surface, forcing the wet squares out of place. Each painting has become a record of the tools’ interaction with the surface: the stops and starts, the kinetic limits of Thompson’s body and the entropic movement of the order of painted squares into noise.

The invention of Bezier’s curve in 1962 indicated the beginning of a tendency to conceptualize and produce objects digitally through a pre-defined sequence, a mode of production that has guided Cheyney Thompson’s latest work around Cézanne’s Study of the Allegorical Figure Bellona in Rubens’ «The Apotheosis of Henri IV», 1883/1886. Thompson transcribed Cézanne’s set of 10 drawings line by line using vector-based paths. By extracting a set of functions, the drawings become an abstract script independent from their output. The legendary female figure of Bellona becomes a site of translation between different regimes of image production, first Rubens’, then Cézanne’s, then Bézier’s through Thompson himself.

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975) lives and works in New York. His work was included in WALK! at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2022), in Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome (2019) and in Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum, New York (2019). Thompson’s work was on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016) and Whitney Museum, New York (2015) in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner. He had a survey exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2012) with an accompanying monograph and a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012). His work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial as well as the 2003 Venice Biennale, curated by Francesco Bonami.