Garis & Hahn presents: Yale MFA Painting and Printmaking Graduates 2015 / July 1-August 8th

Garis & Hahn presents: Yale MFA Painting and Printmaking Graduates 2015  Sarah Faux, Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 56 x 50 inches A Group Exhibition Curated by David Humphrey Exhibition Dates: July 1-August 8, 2015 Opening Reception: Wednesday, July 1st | 6-8 p.m. June 10, 2015 (New York, NY) – Garis & Hahn is pleased to present Yale MFA Painting and Printmaking MFA Graduates 2015, a group exhibition curated by Yale critic and professor, David Humphrey. The 21-person exhibition will present new painting, sculpture, and video works by: Henry Chapman, Maria Cornejo, Brandon Cox, Katherine Davis, Sarah Faux, Sean Fitzgerald, Marcela Florido, Danielle Friedman, Patrick Groth, Camille Hoffman, Fox Hysen, Marisa Manso, Johanna Povirk-Znoy, Luke Rogers, Tschabalala Self, Martha Tuttle, Samantha Vernon, David Walsh, William Warden, Kyle Williams and Luyi Xu. The gallery will host a reception at 263 Bowery on Wednesday, July 1st from 6 to 8 p.m. Yale Painting and Printmaking MFA Graduates 2015 is unorthodox in presenting an entire MFA class in a New York City gallery exhibition upon graduation and a special opportunity for New York audiences to see a curated selection of work by this fresh group of artists emerging from the highly influential Yale MFA program. Curator David Humphrey further contextualizes the show, stating, “MFA programs are a rolling social experiment engaged in a conversation about what matters. No one can know how the two-year chemistry will play out, but it will surely be unpredictable and new art will happen.” Abstract and abstracted figurative painting make up the majority of the work in the exhibition, with many of the artists mixing the two approaches in various ratios. Sarah Faux, who exhibited previously in Garis & Hahn’s Dying on Stage: New Painting in New York 2013 survey of New Casualism, visually articulates the boundaries between the abstract and figurative in her work. Through unfocused, re-arranged, and disembodied anthropomorphic constructions she examines the human body and the viewer’s psychic connection to it rendered in painting. Her newest Untitled paintings depict a mix of recognizable forms, but ultimately only give the impression of a body, making the paint itself and the artist’s gestures the primary subject. Brandon Cox, who has exhibited in several group and solo exhibitions in New York already, is known for a body of work that examines contemporary issues surrounding identity, racial, sexual and institutional politics. His mixed-media works selected for this exhibition include upwards of 10 materials used in one piece alone, including handmade paper, glitter, and linen in abstract compositions both earthen and urban, reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s Italian Arte Povera movement.  Tschabalala Self takes a similar approach, filtered through an individual's sense of identity within a community, referencing her own and other black female bodies to contextualize the iconography they represent within contemporary culture. The roughed out quality of her work makes garish Western culture’s voyeuristic tendencies toward the gendered and racialized body, and the duality of fetishization and censure directed at it.  When considering how best to interpret this body of work selected from such a diverse and varied group of artists, Humphrey draws on an analogy of states of matter, with each student represented as a particle, “well separated and moving freely at high speeds when in a gas state, sliding past each other in a liquid state and tightly packed into a regular pattern, vibrating without movement when solid.”  For the occasion of this exhibition, these artists are packed together in one final solid state, just before they ultimately break out in their liquid or gaseous futures. About Garis & Hahn Garis & Hahn is a gallery-cum-Kunsthalle that mounts exhibitions focused on conceptual narratives and relevant conversations in contemporary art. By displaying an array of carefully curated artists, the gallery endeavors to provide accessibility, education, awareness, and a market to the art while engaging both the arts community and a broader general audience. Location: Garis & Hahn 263 Bowery New York, NY 10002 Contact: P. 212.228.8457 F. 917.720.9851 info@garisandhahn.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11-7* *Starting July 1st through August 8th the gallery will be open Tuesday – Saturday, 11-6 #fineartmagazine