ethan pettit gallery

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 20:17:00 +0000

We are associated with the following artists. Viewings are available by appointment. Please call 347-578-3041

Vivian Adams
Quel Beast
Todd Bienvenu
Tracia Burton
Ken Butler
Dennis Del Zotto
Robert Egert
Chris Fiore
Barbara Friedman
Terrenceo Hammond
Lisa Hohenschuh
Jan Holthoff
Richard Humann
Dominik Leuenberger
Rafael Gomez Luna
Heather Morgan
Jan Holthoff
Richard Humann
John Murray
Jan Holthoff
Richard Humann
Mari Oshima
David Rich
Sonam Rinzin
Eva Schicker
Ian Sullivan

New Dakini Paintings by Eva Schicker

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 03:03:00 +0000

see more here

The Hylozoica Goes to London

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sun, 04 Mar 2018 13:49:00 +0000

This series of drawings from 2010 focuses on two sites in northern Brooklyn: The Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, and an old industrial waterway called Newtown Creek in a part of East Williamsburg that is generally considered Bushwick. These drawings will be included in New Narratives, which takes a look at the empty and forgotten buildings of London, and imagines new uses for them. — Ethan Pettit 2.28.18

Opens Thursday March 8th, 2018, 6-9pm, at hARTslane gallery, 17 Harts Lane, London. Here's the facebook page.

Read more

Celebrating Our 2nd Anniversary of Thangka Classes

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 21:34:00 +0000

This month we celebrate two years of a successful program in Buddhist and Tibetan art, lead by Sonam Rinzin. There will be an exhibition (TBA), and we have produced a beautiful ten-page catalog. For this catalog we are asking for a $12 donation, to help with printing and other costs of running our day-long Saturday classes. You can order the catalog at our store, and shipping is free worldwide. And we'll send you a pdf as well by email, as soon as you order. Your support of this program is greatly appreciated. Namaste.

Check out the Thangka Exhibition Homepage
A Wonderful Article from Hudson Valley Native Sky (11.16.16)

Luna Ranjit Awarded Grinnel Prize

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 20:36:00 +0000

Luna Ranjit (right) with (L-R) Eva Schicker, Luna's husband,
and Brinda Rai in front of paintings by Alkemikal Soshu
at the gallery last year

Luna Ranjit, the cofounder and executive director of Adhikaar, an organization working for the Nepali community in New York, has won the $100,000 Grinnell College Innovator for Social Justice Prize. Ranjit will split the prize with her organization. Luna is a friend of the gallery, and we are thrilled and proud of her well-deserved success. Read the news in the Kathmandu Post.

Ebon Fisher Interviewed on Yale Radio

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 16:46:00 +0000

Brainard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersive pioneer Ebon Fisher about Immersionist culture, memes, and media organisms, starting with Fisher's early work at the MIT Media Lab, and leading up to his role in Immersionism in Williamsburg in the 90s, and beyond. The discussion is about Fisher's work, but it loops around all kinds of interesting developments in Brooklyn back in the day.

The screen grab above shows a schematic of the AlulA Dimension, which was also constructed in "real space" at Nerve Circle Studios on Grand Street, Williamsburg, in the 1990s. The AlulA Dimension on the Web in VRML 3D, which allows the user to explore the architecture of AlulA. Web programming by Larry Rosenthal and Alex Shamson. Architecture by Ebon Fisher.

Interview with Ebon Fisher on Yale University Radio WYBCX
Nervepool and Nervoid Culture
Ebon Fisher on Wikipedia
Ebon Fisher at ABC No Rio
Links to Immersionism on this blog
Nerve Circle facebook album

The AlulA Dimension in Ebon Fisher's loft above a furniture factory
on Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1994.

A Gathering in the AlulA Dimension, Ebon Fisher's loft
70 Grand St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1994

Frank Senger in the AlulA Dimension, 1996

Boundless Space, Vanishing Space

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Tue, 17 May 2016 00:47:00 +0000

A new painting by Rafael Gomez Luna

Eagle Eye Rafael Gomez Luna 2016

The Children's School in Park Slope is one of the best grade schools in the city. It feels like a private school when you walk in. But this is PS 372, which just had its annual fundraising gala and art auction. "My daughter is in a class of twenty-five, and they have six teachers, for 25 children," Rafael Gomez Luna tells me. "We are really lucky to have her in this school, and I am grateful, really grateful. That's why I do so much for the school."

Rafael Gomez Luna's profile on this site

The school's district takes in Gowanus and parts of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. So the parents are wealthy and not so wealthy. They are native New Yorkers and transplants. Rafael himself is a confluence of worlds. He went to elite schools in the Dominican Republic, where he was raised as the foster son of a wealthy family. He is one of hundreds of "godsons" of the former dictator Trujillo, a fact that leant Rafael Gomez some cover in the waning years of the 30-year regime. "There were family godsons and political godsons, I was a political godson," Rafael says with a worldly laugh.

After a stint at a military prep school, Rafael rejected a career in the army, and rejoined his biological parents in Manhattan. First to Chelsea, then to Washington Heights. It was the roiling 70s and 80s. Washington Heights was Latin, and still is. But at that time, there were landed Italian and Sicilian families who controlled most of the nightlife across the metropolitan area. "I was all over the Italian scene, but that was citywide," says Rafael, as distinct from the Heights. "There were very few Italians in the Heights."

The Green Building, Union Street, Gowanus
photo: the green building

Today, Rafael is as typical a New Yorker as any you can find in any neighborhood. You could call him a metropolitan New Yorker, as I myself am, who have family roots in NewYork. albeit no personal connection until my late twenties. Rafael came to the city when he was eighteen. And today he is a painter, an activist, a food-coop squad leader, and passionately dedicated father.

We stroll along Union Street in Gowanus, and Rafael elaborates on the fusion of haut-bohemian aesthetics and designer real estate in this most hot of gentrifying neighborhoods. The next minute he tells me about how he dispatched a gang that attempted to jump him and his wife on this street a decade or more ago. "Initiation ritual," he says. "Let's just say they were very surprised by my reaction." Another worldly laugh. "They took off."

The Children's School, Carroll Street, Gowanus
photo: Brooklyn Catholic

The painting Eagle Eye can hang any way you like, it's an aerial view. And it's sold, auctioned off at the school fundraiser. This and two others by Rafael have found their ways onto walls in Brooklyn. A very small painting on a thick frame, which floats about 10,000 feet over the earth. It is about space, boundless space, and also contracting space, vanishing space for artists in Gowanus.

Rafael's paintings, which he signs "Siri," are comments on what a painting is, on its coinage in our present place and time. And at the same time, a comment on its pictorial distance from our place and time. In these paintings, the pictorial is always allowed to fall back into inscrutable landscapes. The paintings are crafted in the round, "tamped in well," as it were, from several perspectives. It is the compressed, spring-loaded space of Rafael Gomez Luna. Who has a gamely approach to the mysterious moment.

— Ethan Pettit, 16 May 2016

Immersionism Book Underway

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sun, 08 May 2016 19:24:00 +0000

Ebon Fisher and Ilene Zori Magaras are the editors of an upcoming book about the Immersionist movement in Brooklyn in the 1990s, it's influences and outcomes. The book will be replete with photographs from the era, and writing by key Immersionists.

Immersionism is the jewel in the crown of the 90s New York underground. It is the de facto subculture of that time and place and helped give rise to Brooklyn's current creativity. It overlapped the art world, to be sure, but it also overlapped the tribes, the digerati, the body anarchists and a great many very young adults from around the tri-state and beyond, who "got it" and were actually cool, curious, and risk-taking. And with the abundance of cheap industrial space in northern Brooklyn, a perfect storm was born. The abundance of fallow space is the salient of underground culture in Brooklyn in the 90s.

Ebon Fisher was among the dozen or so instigators of this extraordinary, inventive passage, and he is likely the movement's most articulate theorist. Ebon, along with his co-editor Ilene Zori Magaras, has been generous and thorough about identifying the players and influences in this North Brooklyn movement.

Our Spring Salon Is Here

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 21:01:00 +0000

Rafael Gomez Luna, pasture, 2015, detail

The Spring Salon is our group show of all the artists in the gallery, as well as work from our Saturday classes. It is our big chill-out, or thaw, as the case may be, before the autumn season. It is our time to take the measure of the art we've got, and plan for the coming year. Exhibits will rotate to some extent, and there will be several events (to be announced) around the Salon between now and the summer. Do come by, we are open every weekend. This is a great chance to see a lot of wonderful work in a casual and discursive environment.

See the exhibition page for more details.

Todd Bienvenu
Tracia Burton
Ken Butler
Robert Egert
Patricia Fabricant
Chris Fiore
Barbara Friedman
Rafael Fuchs
Jan Holthoff
Richard Humann
Konstantin Lange
Gili Levy
Rafael Gomez Luna
Mari Oshima
David Rich
Sonam Rinzin
Eva Schicker
Alkemikal Soshu
Patrick Todd
The Thangka Atelier

HAPPY 2016

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 03:33:00 +0000

morphopolis – new paintings by Robert Egert

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sat, 26 Dec 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Robert Egert – Bleeding Hearts and Distraught Souls Cannot Prevail
Against Economic Systems Designed by Non-Human Constructs
oil, acrylic, tempera on canvas 60 x 48 in. 2015

Catalog essay by Laura J. Padgett

with an afterword by Ethan Pettit

Oct 3 – Dec 19 – 2015

with Guest Artists Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak

Oct 3 | 7–9:30 PM | Opening Night
Performance by (NOS) (a genre-fluid mental health tribute band)

Andrea Egert LSW – vocals
Jack Schwartz PhD – guitar
Billy Paige CpD – drums

Nov 14 | 8:00–10 PM | Movie Night
with Eva Schicker and Chris Fiore

Dec 19 | 7–10 PM | Closing Party

Shapes have a memory of their own, a life of their own. The creator of a particular shape conjures a life force within the shape. Not a life force recorded by the process of painting but rather inherent in the shape itself by using line and form to bring a shape with agency into being. — RE

The Paintings of Robert Egert

Laura J. Padgett

Let’s have a look at this. Let’s observe closely. When we regard any kind of artwork today we can identify a plethora of references: art historical, cultural, societal, some visual. How can we contemplate what an artwork is about while at the same time see what it is? How do non-visual references influence, not what an artwork looks like, but how we see it? How do we know what something is about? How do we inform ourselves as viewers to be educated enough to know what we are comprehending when viewing an artwork?

These are questions that immediately run through my mind when I look at art, especially Robert Egert’s — and I have been looking at his work throughout his entire career. Is what we see a story, a satire, a microscopic enlargement, an analysis of DNA or patterns taken from a satellite view?

Robert Egert is an artist who thrives from the confluence of many arteries. When I met him during foundation year at Pratt Institute. I was impressed that he was born and raised in Brooklyn. Still, I don’t know if I was more impressed by his knowledge of Greek and Roman myths, I think they kind of balanced each other out.

This is important. This is important to be able to see Robert Egert’s work. He is grounded in the here and now, with a knowledge that runs through antiquity to contemporary science fiction. I don’t want to be too specific, but we can talk about rhizomes, fracking, Pan, the Loreley, Russian cinema, the Golden Age, artificial intelligence and gun control.

Robert Egert – We Need a Working Session
acrylic, dyed glue, tempera on canvas • 30 x 34 in • 2015
collection of Sean Briski

Robert Egert – 26 Females – oil on canvas 28 x 36 in. 2015

All kinds of things are in his head when he paints. He thinks a lot when he works. He doesn’t make it easy on himself. The arteries that nourish his system can contradict each other, can almost cancel each other out, only to join together to strengthen each other. His work has evolved from narrative to abstract to abstract narrative. It is fluid in an overlapping viscous kind of way.

Robert Egert’s fluidity develops from a concept. This is no flimsy use of the word. At Pratt in the seventies we enjoyed a rigorous education in minimalist and conceptual art, both in theory and practice. This underlies Robert Egert’s work no matter what it looks like. His early painting moved from constructed spatial objects to new takes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In the early 1980s when the East Village was hip and dangerous, I saw his exhibition at Civilian Warfare. His paintings were large oil canvases, vernacular objects floated amidst a color field ground, weird perspectives generated a sense of insecure place. These works referenced the uncertainty of the times, a change in value systems, a world drifting towards an ambivalent future.

Years before artists like Neo Rauch appeared on the scene, Robert Egert was making paintings that collaged the mundane with the historical in a mix that said something about contemporary politics. Manifesting duplicity by referencing nostalgia, his work pinned down the eclecticism of the time, making images that were complex and unapologetic. Since then Robert Egert’s work has evolved to be more pondering, while reductive, dealing with questions that go beyond the contemporary. The years following the heady days of New York in the eighties took him in many directions.

Robert Egert – Exogenesis
dyed glue, oil, acrylic on canvas 28 x 36 in. 2015

Robert Egert – Short Palindromic Repetitions
oil on canvas 24 x 30 in. 2015
collection of ethan pettit gallery

Robert Egert went on to study philosophy and sociology, founded a family, wrote for art journals and has had a good look at corporate America. Inevitably, his approach to painting has become more encompassing as he incorporates experience gained outside the hermetics of the art world. His work revolves around questions like: What is life flow? What is humanity?

The sense of searching to make humanity palpable without obvious visual cues is a quest that Robert Egert has set out upon. When we look at the shapes in his paintings we see patterns interlocking and overlays of color. Sometimes we become aware of a figure. Is it human? Put simply, Egert’s paintings can be seen as a cartography of humanity. The body is ephemeral, fleeting and appearing, drifting and separating.

Robert Egert – Quarantine Summary
oil on canvas 22 x 28 in. 2015

Robert Egert – Tautology
pigmented glue, crayon, acrylic on canvas 24 x 28 in. 2015

The interchange of foreground and background is reminiscent of mutating cells. Yet there is also an all-encompassing skin. Is this a view from a petridish? Once again we see the flux from macro to micro, an interweaving of space in which scale becomes a nonissue.

If scale is a nonissue, we are directed to specific ideas that are important to Egert by his use of titles. Concepts that Octavia Butler developed in her trilogy “Lilith’s Brood” have occupied Egert while completing his most recent work. Writes Egert on his blog, “Her books posit interbreeding between an alien society and humans in the wake of a nuclear holocaust that essentially wipes out humans and destroys the earth. The aliens that come to save the few survivors on earth interbreed to create a new hybrid species.”

Robert Egert – We Will Be Reassembling at 5PM
mixed media on canvas 24 x 32 in. 2015
collection of Owen Berkowitz

Interbreeding, an attempt at rescuing while eliminating the original. All these thoughts connect Robert’s new work to his past work in regard to his concerns with dystopian society.

Perhaps we could call Robert Egert’s painting contemporary action painting, however not the kind of action painting by which the body directs the artist’s movements and marks made on the canvas. In Egert’s paintings the gesture is removed from the maker; it becomes a kind of meditative, autonomous painting, a kind of painting that is more related to the European tachism than American action painting.* The German “informel” artist Bernhard Schultze comes to mind with his figures wavering between human and animal forms.

And so we return to the questions one asks oneself when looking at an artwork. When does the decorative become something else? How can an artist translate the complexities of our being into paintings that are not just to be looked at? It comes down to the fact that we understand very little when we first look at an artwork. Therefore, if we see what we know, isn’t it better to know a little more? This is what makes us human. Or is it? This is the question that Robert Egert will continue to pose and continue to offer, at least partial, answers to.

Laura J. Padgett is an American-born artist, photographer, filmmaker, and educator currently based in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Since 1991, Padgett’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her films have been screened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, and at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. Her photography has been widely published. Since 1994, Padgett has held appointments as a lecturer on art theory and criticism at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Offenbach, the Hochschule-Rhein-Main at Wiesbaden, and at Paderborn University. Padgett also writes about film, art, and aesthetic theory. Since 2000 she has been a contributing editor of the film journal Frauen und Film.

* Tachism: a style of painting adopted by some French artists around the 1940s, involving dabs or splotches of color, a process of action and reaction.

Behold. Morphopolis. Transfigured City. Synthetic Turn.

Ethan Pettit

Robert Egert’s career coincides with the transfiguration of New York. He and I knew each other in Williamsburg back in the 90s. We renewed our friendship when he joined the gallery three years ago, when we were located in Bushwick. In the intervening years we witnessed the morphopolis, the city that morphs with impunity. The city that swells and balloons with in-filled and up-zoned urbanity.

Robert Egert – Pendulum
conté on printmaking paper 14 x 21 in. 2012
This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

Though we may decry this event, the early Brooklyn art scene anticipated it. Unwittingly, but certainly, the Brooklyn scene anticipated the hyper-gentrified, neo-liberal accretion that marks our times. For it was a creed of the scene that things should morph. Toward the end of the last century, when “downtown” migrated to Brooklyn, the mode of artistic production began to shift as well. The postmodern art of the 1980s gave way to the unearthly formalism of Brooklyn in the 1990s.

The “immersive” environments of the warehouses as well as a recrudescent abstraction in the plastic arts were emblematic of Brooklyn art. And this was an art given to formal inventiveness, to transforming space, to unknown instead of known culture. It was a “synthetic mode of production,” as distinct from the “analytic” mode of the 1980s that was as yet more astringent, allegorical, and seated in a downtown avant-garde of a hundred years standing.

We might call it “the synthetic turn.” And in its enthusiasm for synthesis, for the breeding of forms and systems, Brooklyn art comported with the transformation of the borough, guided it even, lent to it a utopian zeal, even as the art itself struggled to stay in Brooklyn.

Hence the morphopolitan experience that gives the name to our show. Robert Egert’s career spans the whole of it. He began as an exemplary East Village painter, with the keen reflexive instincts of that school. Those instincts, analytic in nature, in time found expression in singular

shapes that are redolent of the synthoid moment of Brooklyn. His is a rare and vital passage to which people have tended to pay attention. Robert Egert is a draw, of that there is no doubt, and for that we are lucky to have him on board. He resonates with a generation that belongs to the morphopolis.

Robert Egert – Knot
oil on canvas 56 x 48 in. circa 1986
This work is not on display in the show morphopolis

Download the catalog

Robert Egert's profile on this website

Robert Egert Closing Party Dec 19th

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 04:40:00 +0000

Robert Egert Short Palindromic Repetitions
oil on canvas 24" x 30" 2015

We are elated to have been able to place four works from Robert Egert's solo show morphopolis into private collections on both coasts. One of these collections is our own, into which comes this gem of a painting that we just had to have. December 19th will be our closing party, and we hope you will join us to celebrate this wonderful show, before it breaks up and scatters hither and yon. The party is from 7 to 10 pm, December 19. Directions are here. – Ethan

Movie Night this Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 20:55:00 +0000

Film Night with Eva Schicker and Chris Fire
Nov 14 • 8:30–10 PM • 2015

Robert Egert and Friends to Dec 19

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:50:00 +0000

Robert Egert: Beeding hearts and distraught souls cannot prevail against economic policies designed by non-human constructs.
oil on canvas 2015

morphopolis

ROBERT EGERT

New Paintings

with guest artists Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak

October 3 – December 19

Oct 3 • 7–9:30 PM
Opening Night with a performance by (NOS)
— a genre-fluid mental health tribute band

Nov 14 • 8:30–10 PM
Film Night with Eva Schicker and Chris Fiore

Dec 19 • 7–10 PM
Closing Party

Catalog essay by Laura J. Padgett

exhibition homepage
facebook album
facebook invitation
download the press release
download the price list

Perhaps we could call Robert Egert’s painting contemporary action painting, however not the kind of action painting by which the body directs the artist’s movements and marks made on the canvas. In Egert’s paintings the gesture is removed from the maker, it becomes a kind of meditative, autonomous painting, a kind of painting that is more related to the European tachisme than American action painting. The German "informel" artist Bernhard Schultze comes to mind with his figures wavering between human and animal forms.

– Laura J. Padgett (from the catalog essay)

A new body of work by Robert Egert is generally an eagerly-awaited and well-attended event. For that reason we are fortunate to have this artist on board at the gallery. In fact, it's fair to say this gallery is itself the outcome of a history and a conversation that Robert Egert himself started. He has roots, he has reach, people go to his shows.

Robert Egert has tended to work in distinct phases, changing his style and mode of production, and bringing the full force of his thought and enterprise to bear upon focused projects. And there are consistent themes and strategies that run through his career. His tendency, for example, to account for the canvas and the mode of presentation in self-reflexive and jarring ways, is evident in his early paintings from the East Village, as it is in later work that we have featured and written about here at the gallery. Robert's career runs the gamut of the East Village, Williamsburg, a bit of Bushwick, and a good stretch of the artistic diaspora of the Hudson Valley.

Chris Fiore, Crouching Figure, early 1990s

For this show we welcome two guest artists, Chris Fiore and Tobias Tak, whose work comports with Roberts and with the hyper-gentrified "morphopolis" theme that we use here for flavor more than as literal subject matter. A lively program is in store! The band N.O.S. will perform on opening night, and in November we'll have a film night featuring work by Eva Schicker and Chris Fiore. A catalog is available in print and as a download, with a featured essay by Laura Padgett. And we'll wrap with a closing party at the end of December. Plenty of events, plenty of reason to come and see an awesome show! As ever, we are open every weekend.

To complement Robert's work and the sense of the show, we asked Chris Fiore to exhibit a remarkable set of photo-collages he made decades ago. Fiore was arguably the first cyberpunk in the nascent Williamsburg scene in the 1980s. He arrived early and left early, but lived large while he was in Brooklyn. That is to say, he lived alone on an enormous factory floor in a very dicey neighborhood, literally like a character in the movie Bladerunner. In his work from that time we see a collision of deconstructive impulses from lower Manhattan with certain shape-shiftings that would later come to characterize the "synthetic turn" in Williamsburg. It is real turning-point work and well worth a look. Chris Fiore and Robert Egert never knew each other, but each negotiated a transition between Downtown and Brooklyn aesthetics at a formative moment.

Tobias Tak, Canción Tonta, 2012

We have also invited the illustrator and graphic novelist Tobias Tak because he invents unique and elaborate worlds, and has an all-out imaginative style that comports with Robert Egert's lyricism. We have invited the illustrator and graphic novelist Tobias Tak because he invents unique and elaborate worlds, and has an all-out imaginative style that comports with Robert Egert's lyricism. Tak will be showing drawings from his forthcoming book of twenty Canciónes (guitar songs) by Federico Garcia Lorca. This will be the first completely drawn book of Lorca's poetry and will be published by Scratch books in 2016.

— Ethan

Himalayan-Tibetan Thangka Arts with Sonam Rinzin

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 18:59:00 +0000

Saturdays — 1:30 PM to 6:00 PM
The fee per day is $30.00, all of which is paid to the instructor.
Join us.

Sonam Rinzin, White Tara, detail

Ethan Pettit at TEDxBushwick

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Art Causes Gentrification, 21 March 2015
at Livestream Public, 195 Morgan Avenue, East Williamsburg

Watch on YouTube

Todd Bienvenu Opens at Trestle Gallery Tomorrow Night

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 16:50:00 +0000

Todd Bienvenu, Pure Class, 2014, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 46.5 inches
Image courtesy of Life on Mars Gallery

Todd Bienvenu is in Long Story Short at Trestle Gallery with Nicholas Borelli, Katherine Bradford, Hilary Doyle, Kenny Rivero, and Halley Zien.

April 2 – May 8, 2015
Opening tomorrow April 2, 7-9PM.

Trestle Gallery, 168 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

Why the TEDx–Livestream thing is the right thing for Bushwick

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Mon, 23 Mar 2015 03:20:00 +0000

We should welcome any business that wants to do business in what we call our business zones. These will be our allies in preserving the industrial architecture of Bushwick. An "Industrial Business Zone" means just that. It does not mean "no gentrifying hipster videographers and web designers."

My neighborhood in Park Slope is protected by the Landmark laws of New York City. These stately rows of tree-shaded brownstones will always be a steam-punker's Shangri-La in the midst of the glass buildings that are rising all around us. We are a protected legacy of old New York, an architectural treasure, a cultural asset, a guarantee that tourists will always have a nice place to stroll in Brooklyn.

The magnificent warrens of warehouses and factory buildings in Bushwick and East Williamsburg are every bit as beautiful and historically significant as a row of brownstones. But the only thing standing between them and the juggernaut of slash-and-burn condo development, is that they are industrially zoned. What that actually means is that they are political feel-good zones. The designation has more to do with recoiling from gentrification and with nostalgic virtue-signaling, than it has to do with any serious attempt to fill these places with, well, industry.

So what happens when industrial space remains vacant or underused, and falls further into disrepair, while the demand for residential units continues to push in from all sides. You can only justify an "industrial zone" politically for so long if you've got industry to fill it. And this does not seem to be happening as fast as it should in Bushwick and East Williamsburg. There is still a lot of vacant industrial space here.

We need the heavies to help out. We need Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and major film and web houses to set up coding and production centers here. We need a viable push-back against the wholesale residential buildout of Brooklyn, and it has to be something more than wishful thinking and the museum of old Brooklyn factories that we call our industrial zones. That is, if we are to protect the architecture of these old manufacturing centers in the long run, and if we are to preserve a mixed-use commercial and residential borough with good jobs that you can ride your fixie to.

So, when a heavyweight web broadcaster takes over the storied "Third Ward" building on Morgan Avenue and hosts a TED talk, and one of the speakers suggests that Bushwick could become a "Silicon Valley" for the culture industry, it should come as no surprise that some people will bristle at the thought.

Images of anorexic bimbos vamping Louis Vuitton on landing docks ... fly in the face of the bohemian imaginary. An "industrial zone" perhaps, but for the symbolic economy, not the productive one. It would be the hipster Dubai, and the work force for such a place would slam the already slammed housing market. Almost certainly there would have to be residential exceptions for some buildings within the industrial zone.

But it is the right thing to do. If we are to shape a future for industrial Bushwick, and not just whistle dixie to the idea, then we need to be bold. We need Elon Musk and Larry Page to buy up whole blocks of Bushwick and fold them into trusts to house startups, incubators, and firms for the infotainment and technoid economies. We need the burner billionaires on this one. These are the guys who will understand the value of preserving and repurposing a classic industrial neighborhood, who themselves have classic industrial taste, who can make fun and educational things happen, can create jobs, internships for local youth, and on and on. You'll get none of this from the local sharks in the real estate sector. If we love Bushwick, we need to act decisively. We need to pack the businesses in, create a scene, get traction fast and early, let the industry know we mean it.

The alternative, I fear, is worse. A slow burn with no vision. The eternal warehousing of space by successive generations of landed families. The long wait-and-see that was Williamsburg in the 90s, until they tore it all down and built towers anyway. Because we bullshat and were divided. Let's not do that again. Let's get the community and some real money behind a mighty vision for the future of industrial Bushwick.

TEDxBushwick Coming to the Hood

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 14:05:00 +0000

Fundraiser - March 12 - order tickets for $25
Facebook Event
TEDxBushwick on March 21 at Lifestream Public

"Translating Transformation" is the theme of the upcoming TEDx talk in Bushwick, which will stream live from Morgan Avenue on March 21. I am scheduled as an "alternate speaker." Whether I speak or not on that particular day is less important to me than that our gallery is associated with TED, and proud to wear its social icon on our website. It is an association that makes sense, given the discursive orientation of our gallery and our connection to Brooklyn history.

But with luck, I shall speak in Bushwick in less than two weeks! The topic indeed is about transformation. My talk is called Art Causes Gentrification, and it is mostly a slide-show. Short on theory, long on pictures, I will show how artists precede speculators, rezoning, and hype by decades. And how art persists, even if artists themselves do not, as a guiding principal of the gentrified neighborhood, long into the later cycles of affluence.

TED stands for technology, entertainment, and design. Most people have probably seen a TED talk or conference on YouTube at one time or another. The nonprofit was founded in 1984 to disseminate ideas, and today the talks cover almost any topic, all over the world, in more than 100 languages.

TEDx (rhymes with "Fedex") is the independent franchise, where anyone can put together what the main organization calls "TED-like" events that address issues of concern to local communities. This minor league version of TED is done under a free license, and no one gets paid anything. You raise your own venue and funding, and with some guidance and coaching from the main organization, shazzam, you are a TED event.

There are about a dozen speakers at this upcoming TEDx, including born-and-raised Bushwick poet Emanuel Xavier and Bushwick creative pioneer Rah Crawford, who founded the media hybrid Wickbush. If you're into the Bushwick geist, you should not miss this event. I urge you to use the links above, come to the fundraiser on Thursday, and to the talk itself on March 21.

— Ethan Pettit

Burners

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 23:49:00 +0000

A certain well-known talkathon is running boot camp on an afternoon in the Flatiron district. I am one of two alternate speakers, along with eight or nine who are scheduled to deliver in March in a certain well-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn. We've got a drill sergeant in Utah who's skypin' our butts from a big screen, and it's feeling somewhere between Full Metal Jacket and Tony Robbins outside of his "zone."

"So your thesis is that installation art causes gentrification? ... Too intellectual! We want to get away from that. Keep it real, son ... or I'm gonna rip out your eyes and skull-fuck you!"

These folks (late 20s, early 30s) are the urban burners of the gentrification generation. We've got an art therapist working with local kids in the hood, a techie entrepreneur, and a few makers and shakers who've been riding shotgun for ten years or more on mobile scenes that dovetail into urban life, such as it is in these times. I am the Neanderthal of the genre. I'm still thinking you can grab a dead building and throw a rave and the cops won't even show up.

But we are beyond the bohemian imaginary. We are beyond the familiar landscape that lies between the before and the after. The discourse of artistic pioneering and fixer-upper gentrification is a quaint memory. The fight for the weirdness of New York has become ubiquitous, granular. But the fight is on, and has been for a while, and it is trenchant.

Art in New York is anything but dead. It just happens that the present avant-garde makes the ones from the 80s and 90s look manneristic, and so people from the 80s and 90s might not immediately recognize it as an avant-garde. It is not open mic. It does not have a storefront ... in any one place anyway. There is only one Harvard man in the room. It is not your Yale MFA warehouse convention. There's an Italian-American guy with deep roots in Brooklyn, an African-American dude from Philly, kids from Long Island with medical degrees. What happened to the art school avant-garde ... I grouse like a geezer!

But when the boot camp is over and we're just hanging out, and these guys start talking urbanism, it is intense, veteran stuff. They really mean it, and they have a lexicon of terms and tactics born of an urban activism not much older than the Barclay Center. Where have I been?

I propose, to these burners, that New York City is reorienting itself on some fundamental level to a bourgeoise world view. This must involve the excising of our city's signature working class culture. It will not ultimately mean the expulsion of the working class; down-market and subsidized housing will catch up with luxury housing, because we really do need the working class. But the culture and the cadence of life will be bourgeoise through and through. And it is this specter that horrifies. For it flies in the face of probably three-quarters of what we think of as New York.

Vanderbilt Republic, Gowanus Light show, 2014

A 19th century shopping arcade in Paris
(pace Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project)

I tender the Ringstrasse and the Haussmanization of notable European cities more than a century and a half ago. These were proto-gentrifications that cast an overarching pall of gentility over European urban life of a sort that would be alien to most American cities until just a few decades ago. If we Haussmanize Brooklyn, do we have nothing but a mall? Or do we have the birth of a new eccentricity; an Arcades culture that Walter Benjamin would recognize, and which might also square with the entrepreneurial burner ethos?

Can a basically bourgeoise sensibility also be edgy and egalitarian and "dangerous" in a New York sense? In other words, if gentrification totally wins the turf of our nation's largest city, which seems likely, is this a cause for abandoning the city? Or does an avant-garde still have a card to play in this game? It is a question that brings us down the rabbit hole of the commodity fetishization of art, and back up the asshole of its enduring hubris. And I submit the answer is emphatically the latter: yes, we have cards to play, and yes, we are still assholes. But in a good way.

— Ethan Pettit, 9 February 2015

Gili Levy at Proto Gallery in Hoboken

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 07:56:00 +0000

Gili Levy, Seeds, Gouache on Canvas 48 x 56 in. 2015

We are pleased to announce that Gili Levy will be in a show with Lauren Collings, Ginny Casey, and Clare Grill opening in Hoboken NJ on Saturday, January 31st, from 6–9PM.

NOT COLOR ABSOLUTE will run at Proto Gallery until March 8th.

Mari Oshima at Shirley Fiterman Art Center

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 04:30:00 +0000

Mari Oshima’s “Unlimited” is on view in Paper Reveries, a show at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in Lower Manhattan. The show runs until February 9, 2015. See Mari Oshima's page on our website.

Kang Hoodoo

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 06:13:00 +0000

A Note on Zulu Painting.

As it happens I have an appreciable Zulu painting by Todd Bienvenu now hanging in the stairwell of a Park Slope double-wide. It is a brown and creamy splotch of a thing, with lots of subtle greens and blues, and it goes with the colors of the brownstone. It looks as if a house painter used the canvas for cleaning brushes, and left some of his own thoughts as well. A wonderful wipeout of a painting, full of deft brushwork and slights of hand.

Todd Bienvenu, Stooges, 2013

Stooges, by Todd Bienvenu, deserves a great foyer in a Brooklyn mansion somewhere. It's fitting for reception areas, a mischievous "whatever" with a humorous tone. Cool and welcoming, and tasteful. Brownish and creamy shit-colors and throwaway chicken guts comport beautifully with the patina of any distressed hardwood interior in the borough. It is a painting that lends itself to furniture, as furnishing, for the location, for the occasion. A polite, decorative painting, and also snapped like a table cloth from under a banquet. Exceedingly well juggled, and all wrapped up in a mud-ball of brownish baroque. Just a big beautiful rumpus of a painting that doesn't care what you think.

It was serendipity that just as I finished installing this painting in the Greco-Victorian hallway of the building, there appeared Basquiat and the Bayou at some "Confederate Museum" in New Orleans.

In that moment it hit me like a coconut on the head ... that there really is such a thing as zombie painting, or voodoo, or Zulu painting, whatever you want to call it. It is a subculture in painting that excels at what an art critic might euphemistically call "canceling maneuvers" or "abject expressions of defiance or refusal" or simply "insouciance."

Jean-Michel Basquiat, King Zulu, 1986

Robert St. Brice (20th cent. Haitian) signed, oil on board, Voodoo face, 29" x 25"
Robert St. Brice was one of the very few first generation Haitian painters
who was totally unique. His brand of voodoo expressionism straight from his psyche
is totally unique and powerful. So much so he was the inspiration or father
of the Saint Soleil genre that is in such demand today,
but still no one painted like St. Brice. From this website.

Stooges, Installation View

Todd Bienvenu's work is by no means limited to the zombie theme, he's not some goth obsessive. He is better known for his lurid scenes of American life, wrestling, girls, beer culture, and so on. We just happen to have a few gems at the gallery from his earlier and more abstract zombie phase. "Stooges" is looking for placement in a top-notch residence anywhere in the city. "Spitfire" is a high note in Bienvenu's zombie period. In one bullseye after another his work covers an ample range of human experiences and foibles.

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013

Todd Bienvenu, Spitfire, 2013, Detail

Two years of Todd Bienvenu in Bushwick is already a national treasure, a pristine document in style and place of a reviled and envied hepitude. Bienvenu's world is usually presented as an allegory, where the "great white trash" of America stands in for a pastural meditation, like an old dixie rococo painting, upon what is really a complex urban life. Since my gallery has a history with this painter, I can only say we are soon to be safely in the dust of his career, I'm sure. This painting, Stooges, is that dust perhaps. It is a premier brownstone hallway painting, a glorious splotch, stylishly replete with astringent maneuvers in abstraction and figuration. The painting is all cancellations and cross-outs, a lateral dive across language ... with zombies. And it coheres, it hangs together in its localized drama, and in its very human stain as painting.

Stooges, Installation View

Donald Baechler, Untitled ("globe"), 1984

A brutal moment leaves a skid mark on the document of painting. Donald Baechler and Rick Prol may not have been zombie painters, or they may have been at one time or another, I don't know. They might as well have been, I don't care. By zombie painting I do not just mean some special instance of outsider folk art. Rather, I mean the insult carried from outsider folk art into the avant-garde, as a deliberate strategy. This dodge does not come only under the sign of the zombie. Though it comes often enough under that motif, it is really one of several related strategies that pertain to art as resistance.

Several painters in the East Village in the 1980s detected a fault line between the "visual culture" of the postmodernists, and the "visuality" that was preferred by the old school painters. They tore up that fault line. They decided to insult painters and conceptualists in one go. Hoodoo painting is one example of this trend from the strange afternoon of the East Village scene. Strong icons are needed to rattle the cage of painting, and there is nothing in the universe of aesthetic experience quite like the rooster-strut of a Haitian or a Bayou zombie. It is a treasured vernacular of the American continent.

Rick Prol, I Have This Cat, 1985, acrylic on canvas, wood, and glass, 96 x 93 in.

"If painting is dead, well then, here's a painting of a zombie."

— Todd Bienvenu, 2013

This, by the way, is zombie criticism. It has no real existence. I represent Todd Bienvenu, I sell his work. And so of course I like it. Obviously I am a big fan. You may call this is an advertisement. All the same, important announcements about the artist are in order. Someone must note that Todd Bienvenu is teaching in Louisiana right now, just as the Basquiat "bayou paintings" go on exhibit there.

John d'Addario in his piece in Hyperallergic informs us that the Mississippi had a powerful imaginative influence on Basquiat, a Brooklynite of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage whose actual experience of the US South was limited. Todd Bienvenu comes from Louisiana with Cajun roots. And these two American painters bare comparison, I submit, and have said in the past, in that each is a trenchantly original painter of zombies.

Zombie aesthetics are folk art entangled in the ganglion of fine art. The zombie is the atavistic feature of a discourse; the twitching of the insensate. It is the chicken man in Blue Velvet. It serves to rend the wall of intelligibility. What Basquiat and Bienvenu, and Prol and Baechler do is to acknowledge unintelligibility in art. The painting is the document of a mistake, and the artist is ready to abandon art as the critics do. That is, in haste, with Adorno, and just as readily. And I like a painting that has no scruples about such things.

— Ethan Pettit, 31 October 2014

Todd Bienvenu, Zombie Apocalypse, 2013

Inventory and Prices for Todd Bienvenu
Artist's profile on this site
artist's website
The Gatorman Cometh – portrait of the artist as a young zombie, May 2013
more on Bienvenu in our gallery notebook 2014

I'm the only hell my mama ever raised

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:12:00 +0000

The thing I love about this painting, is that we have a girl who is sixteen? Absolutely beautiful and stubborn white trash. She already knows she doesn't have to live here. She knows she can waltz out into the big world any day and get plenty for what she's got. That's not the problem. The problem for her at this point is just how to make the first move.

I'm the only hell my mama ever raised, Todd Bienvenu, 2014

Full House East - Reception This Friday

noreply@blogger.com (ethan pettit) — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 17:48:00 +0000

Our long-running group show was initiated by David Rich and Paulette Myers-Rich in St Paul Minnesota back in July as Full House West. The show migrated to our gallery in Park Slope Brooklyn in early September, and it will remain up until November 2nd.

Please join us on Friday, October 3rd at 6PM for a reception for the artists.

Location Details Here

Download the Press Release (pdf)
Exhibition Homepage

Jim Denomie, Attack on New Ulm, oil on canvas 26 x 32” 2012

It is a wonderful thing that all events on canvas are manifestations of the individual and the particular. And it may be interesting as well to see if painting might engage with the thought that affords this wonderful thing in the first place. Abstract painting should put itself to the task of forcing a historical showdown with postmodern thought. We should seek from abstraction the space that was opened by postmodernism. We should ask if this new “abstraction” is not the postmodern painting that never happened.

Jim Denomie’s painting opens up some of this disturbing depth. Adorno said in a famous lecture, “The images of our life are guaranteed through history alone.” He was attacking essentialism and transcendental woo-woo in German philosophy in 1931, and philosophy has not been the same since that attack. Adorno forced a confrontation of philosophy with its existential conceits; he rejected the idealist formulations of “reality” and “being” that were fashionable at the time.

This is not to say I like Denomie’s painting because it is “relevant” or “about something” or because it reminds me of the 19th century Indian art at the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City. It is no documentary piety that draws me to the painting. But because the painting invokes history and horror, this is what courts a certain kind of aesthetic adventure. I don’t really care what history or what horror in particular it is. The mordant cynicism of the Lakota chief riding in a convertible through some disturbing actual event … this hatches a space that is dialectical and not coupled to some immanent, breathless, present moment. We are in need of that dialectical space.

— Ethan Pettit

Robert Egert Brown Mars oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. 2014

Patricia Saterlee Gloria 70 flashe paint on linen, 26 x 23.5 in. 2012

Barbara Lea Illicit Lunch oil on canvas 16 x 16” 2011

Todd Bienvenu Talking About Abstract Painting oil on canvas, 2013

Jim Denomie