Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Sarah McEneaney
Trestletown Stomping Ground
October 10 to November, 17 2019

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Trestletown Stomping Ground, an exhibition of recent paintings by Sarah McEneaney. The exhibition marks the artist’s seventh with the gallery and the first at the gallery's Lower East Side location. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by the artist and writer Trevor Winkfield.

The exhibition will consist of eight paintings all made since 2015. In these works, McEneaney continues her project of documenting her life in a seeming prolonged self-portrait. She paints herself in her home and working in her studio. We see her at her desk and coming home from shopping while her pets await her return. This body of work also shows her in and around her neighborhood, Trestletown, in the Callowhill section of Philadelphia, and the urban landscape that surrounds it.

These diaristic paintings are made utilizing planes of bright colors broken up by areas of patterning and abstraction. Interspersed throughout are a myriad of intricate details, often revealing paintings within paintings. Her approach has been compared to a savvy folk-art, noting that she at times uses a skewed perspective, and at other times an allover flatness. McEneaney's works also have a spontaneous feel, but this effect comes out of numerous preliminary sketches, often made from neighbors' rooftops.

McEneaney has lived in this area of Philadelphia since she bought an old factory and warehouse, after graduating from art school in 1979. She is an ardent activist in the neighborhood, helping to create the first neighborhood association, of which she is president. She was also pivotal in the transformation of a defunct elevated train track, the Reading Viaduct, into a park. This is not only a neighborhood she paints, she has also distinctly shaped it. Included in the exhibition are two large-scale paintings, When You Wish and Trestletown from the Wolf which depict the new verdant railway park coursing through a now mixed-use neighborhood of graffiti strewn old factories, church steeples and repurposed buildings.

McEneaney's subject matter has been a constant throughout her career and as Trevor Winkfield notes in the catalogue's essay - McEneaney has painted her home and studio so many times that both have become as familiar to her audience as that other serial unfolding, Cézanne’s Mont St. Victoire. And like Cézanne’s repeated analysis of that legendary mountain, each time McEneaney scrutinizes her home it looks a little bit different, as she changes viewpoints over the years.

McEneaney received a certificate of painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and studied at Philadelphia College of the Arts. She had major solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX and the ICA Philadelphia. Her work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions including Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has had regular solo gallery exhibitions in New York since 2001 and Philadelphia since 1979. McEneaney received a Purchase Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and has been awarded artist residencies at the Chinati Center, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Ballinglen Art Center of County Mayo in Ireland. Her works were recently acquired by the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, the Delaware Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Listings Information: Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: [email protected] Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm, Sunday 12pm – 6pm Social Media: Join the conversation on social media by mentioning Tibor de Nagy and using the hashtags and when posting. Facebook: Tibor de Nagy Gallery | Instagram: | Twitter: Tibor de Nagy Gallery 11 Rivington Street 212 262 5050 [email protected]

Richard Baker

Provincetown/New York
work from the 80s and 90s

September 4 to October 6, 2019
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Richard Baker Provincetown/New York Works from the 80s and 90s. This will be the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. This show will focus on Baker's early works including many from his first exhibitions at the Joan Washburn Gallery.

Richard Baker lived in Provincetown full time between 1983 and 1993 before moving to New York and dividing his time between Cape Cod and New York. While in Provincetown Baker quietly honed his craft and began exhibiting there in the late 1980s and then in New York in the early 1990s. His Provincetown studio was in the house of the late artist Pat de Groot, where he encountered many artists including the filmmaker and artist John Waters. It was there that he met the collector Charles Carpenter who became enamored of his work and introduced him to Joan Washburn who then exhibited Baker’s work twice in 1991 and continued to give him annual shows for the next dozen years.

What made Baker’s work fresh and compelling at the time was his approach to traditional still life painting. A 1995 New Yorker reviewer wrote of his work, “Small, finely executed canvases with intellectual heft and a compelling carnal presence.” Still life subjects in this exhibition will include tools, fish, shells, flowers, rope and skate egg cases. The Cape Cod landscape is also a key element in Baker’s work as each still life sits or floats before the dunes, bay, and sea. These modest paintings (most no larger than 12 x 12 inches) take us to places with metaphorical, philosophical, spiritual and poetic meanings and feelings all the while capturing the objects with illusionistic care. Of great importance to Baker is the tactile and sensuous properties of the oil paint itself - his surfaces express command of the material while also exploring the range of its limitations. Baker admired the painters Marsden Hartley, Albert York and Philp Guston for their direct unmitigated approach to painting. Baker was also intrigued by contemporary painters Bill Jensen and Thomas Nozkowski for their honest and ambitiously experimental work.

Baker recently turned sixty and moved back to New England after twenty-five years of being based in New York. This is a fitting time to revisit his younger years when he first started exhibiting his work. It will also bookend several vital decades of mature work and the launching pad for future work.

Richard Baker has exhibited widely throughout the United States. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the Po***ck Krasner Foundation Grant and New England Foundation for the Arts Grant. Having taught for eleven years at The Mason Gross School of The Arts, Rutgers University, Baker is currently taking a hiatus from teaching to focus on studio work.

Ann Toebbe interviewed in artspeak.nyc by Atesh M. Gundogdu

“Friends and Rentals”

Tibor De Nagy Gallery

New York, 15 Rivington Street

The exhibition features Toebbe’s intricate works made with gouache, pencil and paper collage on wood panels. The images depict domestic interior settings pulled from the social media posts of the artist's friends and family in Ohio and Kentucky, as well as her own photos with her husband and children. Toebbe archived these social media posts from her large extended family, including 42 cousins, amassing a trove of images of family gatherings, birthday parties, baby showers, and displays of Christmas decorations. She uses the background details revealed in these postings to construct portraits of the homes themselves. One work, Friend: Sandie, is a widow’s home in Kentucky that is all frill draperies, doilies and Christmas ornaments; another, Friend: Becky(pictured above) shows a cousin’s sprawling house in southern Ohio, furnished with large furniture and even larger TV screens tuned to sports channels, like a specimen of American suburban life preserved in amber. Ann Toebbe answers our publishing director Atesh M. Gundogdu"s questionnaire.

Atesh M. Gundogdu: Hello Ann to begin, can you describe you studio space?

Ann Toebbe: I rent a run down one bedroom garden apartment in my condo complex in Hyde Park, Chicago. It has a kitchen, main room where I work, and a back bedroom which I use to hang and store work. I rented it in 2010 and it hasn’t been updated at all over the years so it has a crumbling charm. Looking out my windows through the spider webs I’m at eye level with the shrubs and bushes.

What images keep you company in the space where you work?

AT: For the past couple years I’ve been transfixed by Indian miniature painting. I’ve had the good fortune of seeing several great shows at The Art Institute, The Met, and Seattle Art Museum and have the excellent catalogs at hand in my studio. I also had the opportunity to travel to India with the support of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant in 2016. On this trip I bought a couple miniature paintings from local artisans.

Ann Toebbe Friends: Lisa and Tim, 2018 gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel 30 x 40 inches
Ann Toebbe Friends: Lisa and Tim, 2018 gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel 30 x 40 inches

What was the impetus for “Friends and Rentals”?

AT: The Friends paintings are my Facebook friends who posted images that revealed their homes in the background. I saved and printed the images to reconstruct the interiors sometimes getting an entire floor plan. Five of the Friends are my midwestern cousins because they posted the most usable photos and “Friends: Lisa and Tim” is an artist couple who by their posts seem to have an amazing set up. The Rentals (La AirBnB and VRBO) are two properties we rented as a family, me with my husband and two daughters. These rentals were quirky enough to inspire paintings. I painted “LA Air BnB” and “Michigan VRBO” from photos I took while we were renting the spaces.

What emotions are you channeling into your paintings?

AT: Initially the personal connection I have with the spaces I paint, a cousin, a friend, or the piano teacher, sparks the inspiration to make a painting. This personal connection could inspire nostalgia, curiosity, even bemusement, about their life triggering my interest in sorting through their things. The paintings don’t emanate an emotion, they are creatively composed inventories of my chosen subject’s home.

Ann Toebbe, Friend: Jana, 2018 gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel 24 x 30 inches
Ann Toebbe, Friend: Jana, 2018 gouache, paper collage and pencil on panel 24 x 30 inches

What is the relationship between meaning and aesthetics?

AT: I believe good art captures the energy of the artist at a creative high point. I would define meaning as the emotion, feeling, or connection to the beauty (subjective) in an artwork that draws you closer to your humanity. This disclosure facilitated by the artist through their art is the relationship between meaning and aesthetics.

What do you think is more important in life: Self-actualization or making art?

AT: In my case self-actualization is achieved by making art so I think this makes them equal.

Which art exhibition was the most influential in your professional journey?

AT: Florine Stettheimer’s exhibition at the Whitney in 1995. I saw it on an art school trip to New York from Cleveland in my early 20s. I loved her paintings and she showed me you could use representation outside of established rules or techniques. This exhibition also made me aware of Florine’s sister Carrie’s dollhouse, a discovery that affirmed my attraction to interiors.

What is your favorite ritual?

AT: Taking a 10-20 minute nap after lunch in my studio. Monday through Friday usually at 1:15pm.

The exhibition runs through July 27, 2019

Ken Butler
performs "Voices of Anxious Objects"
Saturday, May 25th, 7PM - doors open at 6:30, $10
rsvp to reserve a seat to [email protected]

Artforum
Critics Pick
by Nicholas Chittenden Morgan
May 9, 2019

A Reading from Joe Brainard's Writings
(while looking at 100 of his works)

Sunday, April 28
4-6pm

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
15 Rivington Street

In conjunction with the exhibition Joe Brainard - 100 Works

Readers will include:

Ron Padgett
Rosie Schaap
John Yau
Kyle Dacuyan
Patricia Spears Jones
Ann Stephenson
Paolo Javier
Josh Borja
Johnny Stanton

hosted by Anselm Berrigan

"I'm never totally convinced, riding a bus, that I'm on the right bus" -- Joe Brainard

Susan Jane Walp reviewed in Art in America by Eric Sutphin

Susan Jane Walp
Recent Paintings
Opens March 9, 4-6PM
March 9 to April 14, 2019

Tibor de Nagy is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Susan Jane Walp. This exhibition will include 15 paintings all made since 2014. This will be Walp’s sixth solo show at the gallery and her first at the gallery’s 11 Rivington Street location.

Susan Jane Walp’s paintings are studies in color, surface, and geometry. She works on an intimate scale, with a rotating vocabulary of domestic subject matter, such as bowls of fruit, corks, utensils and folded pieces of printed paper. These works have a consistent precision and are undergirded by the artist’s unique concept of color and tone. This working method allows for many aspects of her work to remain constant, such as scale and subject matter, while also allowing the work to be always evolving and renewing itself.

Walp’s approach to painting was deeply influenced by the artist Lennart Anderson whom she met when he was teaching at a Boston University summer program at Tanglewood in 1968, and she again studied with him at Brooklyn College in the 1970s. Anderson taught a method of painting pioneered by the American portrait and genre painter Charles Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s technique was known as the “color spot” method, where a painting was begun by laying out areas of color, and then using the relationships between the colors as a springboard. Anderson learned this method from Hawthorne’s student Edwin Dickinson, Anderson then passed it on to Walp. In speaking of Anderson’s influence Walp states: “For lack of a better word (and one he might not approve of), it was an abstract world. Entering it was entering a realm of infinite possibility, and from the very beginning I loved dwelling in it.” Thus a tradition begun in the 19th century continues, through Walp's distinctive body of work, well into the 21st century.

Susan Jane Walp graduated from Mount Holyoke College and continued her studies at the New York Studio School, Skowhegan and Brooklyn College’s MFA Program. She has been awarded Fellowships in Painting from the Guggenheim and Bogliasco Foundations. In 2017 she was Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College.

Larry Rivers - O'Hara N**e with Boots and Me and My Shadow I-IV Art Basel Miami Beach - Survey Section, booth S12

Jess - "Secret Compartments," opens tonight at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, 5-7PM
http://www.kohngallery.com/

Summertime
June 21 to July 28, 2019
Artists included:
John Ashbery, Richard Baker, Biala, Nell Blaine, Joe Brainard, Delia Brown, Rudy Burckhardt, Jim Butler, Mary Carlson, Donald Evans, Jane Freilicher, Eliott Green, Hugh Holland, Vera Iliatova, Shirley Jaffe, Hildur Jonsson Asgeirsdottir, Medrie MacPhee, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Jen Mazza, Sarah McEneaney, Ryan McGinley, John O'Reilly, Fred Reichman, Larry Rivers, James Romberger, Sandi Slone, Ann Toebbe, Alan Uglow, Susan Jane Walp, Neil Welliver and Trevor Winkfield

Last Two Days: Jess - Secret Compartments closes tomorrow May 6. Tibor de Nagy, 15 Rivington Street. Today, "
Saturday 10-6, Sunday May 6, 12-6. image: Jess (Collins) "Untitled (with Joan Crawford Head)," 1952 - 53 collage 18 x 23 inches

Jess reviewed by Holland Cotter, April 27, 2018

TIBOR DE NAGY through May 6; 15 Rivington Street, tibordenagy.com. One of the neighborhood’s newest galleries is also one of city’s oldest. Tibor de Nagy opened on the Upper East Side in 1950 and recently moved downtown to Rivington Street. The artist it’s showing, Jess Collins (1923-2004), was always a downtowner in his offbeat soul. He began his career as an Army scientist and soon ditched that for art. Settling in San Francisco, Jess (his professional name) became a painter and collagist with a gift for turning images from films, children’s books and advertising into Surreal, Romantic, often ho******ic fantasies. His impulse toward precision crafting made him a recluse for much of his long career, which the show samples, early and late, in “Secret Compartments.”

The 54 Galleries to See Right Now in New York A neighborhood-by-neighborhood guide to the spring’s best shows.

Joe Brainard
Artist and Writer
1941-1994

in T Magazine, The New York Times Styles Magazine
By Thessaly La Force, April 17, 2018

Those We Lost to the AIDS Epidemic A memorial to a small fraction of the thousands of New Yorkers who died of H.I.V./AIDS-related causes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv5OSKfmUKA
Here is a James Kalm tour of the Jess - Secret Compartments, the exhibition continues until May 6.

Brent Green at ANDREW EDLIN and Jess at TIBOR de NAGY James Kalm brings viewers along for a Lower East side double-header featuring a pair of eccentric creators. Brent Green who has gained major institutional at...

John Ashbery - They Knew What They Wanted: Collages and Poems
reviewed in the New York Times Book Review

John Ashbery, a Poet
With Paper and Glue
A new book pairs some of Ashbery’s poems
with the sophisticated and playful visual collages
he also made over the course of his career.

By Gregory Cowles April 6, 2018

The poet John Ashbery, who died in September at the age of 90, cultivated a spirit of impish collision in his work — sometimes building whole poems (known as centos) out of other people’s lines, other times incorporating fragments of found language or swerving suddenly to a new topic in a spasm of surreal free association. The resulting poems were like high-performance cars assembled from junkyard parts, or runway fashions with the stitches intentionally showing. They were, essentially, collages.

So it felt fitting for the world to find out, late in his life, that Ashbery had for decades devoted himself to making visual collages as well, starting as a student at Harvard in the 1940s and culminating in gallery shows in his last decade. Some of these works have now been paired with poems and collected in a new book, THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED: Poems & Collages (Rizzoli Electa, $35), edited by Mark Polizzotti.

Ashbery’s images demonstrate the same sense of gleeful mischief that’s everywhere in his poetry, mixing fine art with advertising and comic strips and picture postcards, all of it married with the artist’s sure eye for color and mood and perspective. The result is an entire oeuvre of fantasy landscapes, such as the one in “Promontory,” pictured here, from 2010.

“I’m firmly eclectic in these and in most things,” Ashbery told the poet John Yau once, in an interview included at the front of the book (itself aptly pasted together from various conversations over 10 years). At the end of that interview, Yau said to Ashbery, “In a number of your recent collages, it’s like you are about to undertake a journey or begin a dream.”

Ashbery’s reply: “That’s how I feel much of the time.”

Gallery artist, Biala, is on view at the ADAA fair with Pavel Zoubok Gallery. Zoubok, a dealer with a deep knowledge of artists who work in collage, is featuring a group of works from a time when Biala worked intensely with collage. These works are notable for their exquisite tension between abstraction and representation. Roberta Smith writes of this presentation in her New York Times review of the fair: "Pavel Zoubok is showing little-known collages from the late 1950s and early ’60s by the American expatriate painter Janice Biala (1903-2000) that ambitiously conjure Abstract Expressionist gestures in collages incorporating cut paper."

TREVOR WINKFIELD
Saints, Dancers and Acrobats
FEBRUARY 17 TO MARCH 25, 2018

Tibor de Nagy is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Trevor Winkfield. The exhibition titled Saints, Dancers and Acrobats will be Winkfield’s ninth solo show at the gallery, and his first at the gallery’s new Rivington Street location.