Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to present for 8-bridges the crème de la crème of the gallery’s backroom selection. These works are monumental in scale, precision, and/or embark on a signature approach for the artist featured. Each of these works host a unique backstory that celebrates their existence and reminds us of what makes the long-term collaborations we have as a gallery so important and worthwhile, and why we return to them year after year. Our conversations have continued over many years, exhibitions, bodies of work, and changes in the city.  And no matter how often these conversations occur, they are never finished.

Catharine Clark Gallery returns to 8-bridges with The Sea Around Us, a group presentation of works that draw on maritime imagery and themes to invite deeper questions around what it means to feel “adrift” in this moment where so many of us have experienced isolation and uncertainty, unsure of what rescue and survival will require.

Drawing its title from environmentalist Rachel Carson’s iconic 1951 book of the same name, the gallery’s presentation reflects on how our broader psychological landscape can overwhelm and envelop us. At the same time, the works on view remind us of how creative practices provide us with a space in which to meditate on this experience of precarity, while also offering us the tools to moor ourselves again.

The Sea Around Us is presented in response to Nina Katchadourian’s solo exhibition To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World, on view at the gallery and online through February 20, 2021.

Giving and taking, adding or subtracting; both artists play with the body. Materazzi subverts the usual presentation of the female body, and Zsako adds in humor and eroticism to his paintings. Zsako points to the edges of our perception and the haptic, an almost-unfelt touch. Materazzi presents her body as a formalized and abstracted form. The gaze and a desire to touch is implied in both artists’ works. 

In Materazzi’s work, the other is tacit in the tension in how she holds a grip, a contorted foot, implying a rigid energy, a coiled potential. In other works she relaxes into a languid pool, reminding us of the release that delivers us to a relaxed state, be it sensual, or derived from exhaustion, or through meditation or intoxication. How we connect, how we change states, both artists ask questions about connection and lack there-of. 

*Credit to Kate Bush for the title

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present works by Ambreen Butt and Eva Schlegel. 

Ambreen Butt’s intricate collage works on paper celebrate formal elements of color and pattern central to traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting. Trained in these techniques in Lahore, Pakistan, Butt has re-imagined the rigorous art form. Say My Name, her most recent and ongoing series, explores the relationship between power and vulnerability in order to pay homage to innocent lives lost in international warfare. Butt’s process begins with staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out an individual name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, becomes a form of meditation. The result elevates the names into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength. 

Eva Schlegel’s photography often focuses on the overlooked beauty within intimate, commonplace spaces. By removing details in her images, often by shooting out-of-focus or blurring the details later, Schlegel distills what is otherwise familiar and unremarkable into compositions of transfixing allure. For her blurred architecture series, Schlegel reduced un-named architectural spaces into geometric abstractions. The minimal and ethereal images, set mostly in tones of white and gray, float the eye through physical environments in ways impossible in real time and space. For her Untitled (dragonfly) works, Schlegel spontaneously witnessed and captured two dragonflies mating at a dinner party. The resulting photographs freeze in time a natural phenomenon of little human consequence. Edited with x-ray-like contrast, the images appear otherworldly, simultaneously banal and extraordinary.

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present In the Abstract, a group exhibition curated by Dasha Matsuura featuring new works by Abel Macias, Ellen Rutt, Rachel Strum and Madeleine Tonzi. Each artist brings a fresh perspective to contemporary abstraction, from geometric shapes to the suggestion of surreal forms.

Ranging from the purely abstract patterns in Ellen Rutt’s textile-based works to the loose landscape references of Abel Macias’ work, each of the artists featured expresses intangible moments in each piece.

Rachel Strum’s work blazes in a riot of color and texture, creating a cosmic depth in each color field. Working with reclaimed and scrap textiles, Ellen Rutt engages the tradition of quilting in times of crisis to create fluid patterns and bold compositions. Punctuating her works with points of entry, Madeleine Tonzi’s paintings float across blush-toned planes dotted with surreal architectural structures. Evoking warm summer winds, Abel Macias’ gestural paintings examine texture and pattern while intimating a natural space. Each of the artists featured creates a non-specific space for the viewer to pour into.

Join us for a live walk-through of the exhibition and an artist Q&A on Saturday, February 13th on Instagram live at @hashimotocontemporary

pt.2 is pleased to present a selection of works from Chelsea Wong’s Poetry, After All, Rachel Kaye’s Sweeping, and Wardell McNeal’s A Series of Meditations on the Complexities of Life. All three exhibitions open February 13th, by appointment only through March 2, 2021.

Romer Young Gallery continues its exhibition with artist Johnny Abrahams. A Sprint for the Idler will be on view through Saturday, February 27th.

Abrahams’ paintings are abstractions, characterized by large geometric forms painted in oil and acrylic on raw burlap and canvas in black, red, and yellow. Through repetition and subtle interactions between the void and painted form, the compositions convey rhythm, phrasing, cadence, and an unmistakable melodic character.

And in the back gallery, Romer Young Gallery has installed a curated collection of works by gallery artists Nancy White, Christoph Roßner, Joseph Hart, Jean-François Lauda, and Pamela Jorden

Our Eyes Are On Fire brings together 12 artists around interweaving themes of radical hope, visioning utopia, and expressions of joy in the context of the pressing issues we face as a society. The title of the show partially speaks to the wildfires that have ravaged California in recent years, but it also refers to the incisiveness and clarity of vision artists possess in relationship to the world, and the ways that they are uniquely capable of transforming dilemma into the sublime.