Martha Armstrong
Closed Wednesday 3/29 for Installation, See You Tomorrow!
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 10 - 5 pm
127 S 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
215 - 665 - 8138
Blue Glasses And Dishware, 12.25″ x 12.25″, Watercolor On D’Arches Paper
Eileen Goodman: Into Light
In her latest solo exhibition, Into Light, Eileen Goodman’s watercolor facility is on bold display. Since her transition away from oil paint in the late ‘80s, Goodman has skillfully tamed this temperamental, aqueous media for use in her abundant, large-scale still life paintings. When creating work, she is focused on the basic components of observation, color, light, and shadow. It is only upon reflection, after deep shadows have defined their purpose, that possible interpretations come to light.
Beginning with an arrangement of objects, such as fresh flowers or vegetables, Goodman utilizes photography to preserve their appearance and capture a particular tone. She then crops and adjusts a printed version of the photograph to construct a desired composition. Once satisfied, the painting commences with washes of transparent pigments on white paper. Select areas are thoughtfully conserved for future highlights while the rest of the image is pushed into the paper, delineating shape and space.
2020 L, 30" x 30", Oil On Canvas
Keith Breitfeller: Respite
Color and abstraction have been the driving forces in Keith Breitfeller’s studio practice since his formative years. His signature method encourages regular experimentation within a set of laid-out parameters and has evolved over time to produce a consistent body of simplified, gradient color field paintings.
Respite delivers a blissful array of Breitfeller’s quietly varied compositions. While works appear in different sizes and colors, inconspicuous differences occur beneath the persistent layers of ‘ticked’ spots that pulsate with chroma. Some paintings incorporate obscured shapes, creating shadowy forms when viewed from certain angles and lighting, while others are conceived as sets of rotating colors. Breitfeller also utilizes reflective materials, complementary or analogous color combinations, and expressive paint application. An intentional measure, the field of color stops short of the edges of the canvas, exposing a glimpse of the complex world beneath.
These details serve to draw the viewer into any number of imaginative experiences. One might feel they are being absorbed into a peaceful blizzard of blues, enveloped by a grove of blooming, pink dogwood trees, or showered...
Henry Murphy, Tree, 6.25″ x 6.25″, Oil On Wood
Short & Sweet III: Group Exhibition
Gross McCleaf is pleased to present Short & Sweet III, a collection of mini-exhibitions featuring artworks by Graham Cuddy, Henry Murphy, Kimi Pryor, Rhonda Wall and Nasir Young.
Graham Cuddy finds pleasing color and design relationships in his quilt-like paintings. Reminiscent of domestic and functional Folk Art, his handkerchief-sized constructions involve delicately painted color blocks on natural linen, overlaid with distinct hand-stitched patterns of starbursts, grids, and curvilinear lines.
Henry Murphy also takes cues from Folk Art and blends it with American Modernism in his representational paintings. His approach includes references as disparate as Grandma Moses and Fairfield Porter, Bill Trayor and Charles Burchfield. His pictures are sweet, painterly depictions of rural and urban locations.
The city of Philadelphia is Nasir Young’s muse. His paintings are love letters to the many ordinary sights surrounding him, with every pavement crack and graffiti tag carefully represented. Each work is finely painted with care and honesty.
Stuart Netsky featured in John Thornton's Artist Stuart Netsky, Beauty, Love, and Excess
Stuart Netsky, a 1995 Pew Fellow, has been a presence in the Philadelphia art scene for decades, and I finally got to meet him at his March 11th opening at Gross McCleaf. His new work, which combines the Rococo with psychedelia, is complex, beautiful and fabulously excessive!
Elizabeth Geiger featured in John Thornton's Elizabeth Geiger, a Perceptual Painter Channels Cubism
Elizabeth Geiger is a superb still life painter and a member of the Perceptual Painters, a group known for working from direct observation. In her current show at Gross McCleaf, Liz is showing work with a distinctly Cubist inflection. I wanted to get to the roots of her apparent switch from perceptual to conceptual painting.
“The shadows are everything, imbuing unexpected meaning. They are unplanned, undefined, but dependent upon the viewer emotionally or psychologically. Shadows hide and reveal, form emerges and disappears.”
-Eileen Goodman
In her latest solo exhibition, Into Light, Eileen Goodman’s watercolor facility is on bold display. Since her transition away from oil paint in the late ’80s, Goodman has skillfully tamed this temperamental, aqueous media for use in her abundant, large-scale still life paintings. When creating work, she is focused on the basic components of observation, color, light, and shadow. It is only upon reflection, after deep shadows have defined their purpose, that possible interpretations come to light.
In this feature by Clayton Campbell, we're introduced (and for some of us re-introduced) to Stuart Netsky, a seminal Philadelphia artist and arts educator who has shown widely in the City, although not recently. Netsky's new works at Gross McCleaf Gallery were sparked by the pandemic, as many of his earlier works circled around the AIDS epidemic. Be sure to read this fine feature about an important local artist and run to see the exhibit, which ends this Saturday, March 25, 2023.
The arc of Stuart Netsky’s practice has so far been bookended by the AIDs epidemic and the COVID pandemic. A long-time resident and well known artist in Philadelphia, his current exhibition Walking Backward into the Future, at Gross McCleaf Gallery through March 25th, manifests the charming and incisive continuum of an eclectic, sophisticated artmaker.
Elizabeth Johnson: Your prints in your current show join radically different images to express the visual overkill of contemporary culture, but it seems that you aren’t entirely critical of the excess, since you revel in it. Do you enjoy scrolling though social media or jumping between cinematic decades via streaming? How does the seam between images function for you? Does it indicate a jump in thought and/or time and function to compress a group of dramatic moments into a whole? Are you aiming to compare several unrelated high points of Western culture? or to express the vastness of cultural experience?
Stuart Netsky: I do revel in excess to express the visual overkill...
Elizabeth Johnson: Your previous still lifes and landscapes were realistic. Your recent paintings use Cubist formats and tropes. What made the change? Are you still doing landscapes? Are you focusing only on interiors for this show?
Liz Geiger: When I started painting, I was wide-eyed and open to anything and everything. Subject matter wasn’t as important as learning how to paint, how to make light and space. I worked only from observation and looked mostly at observational painting, which seemed natural being married to a realist painter. Later, I tackled composition, studying old composition books by the armload from The University of Virginia library. Understanding composition took years....
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Stuart Netsky’s rich digital paintings and colorful sculptural assemblages in Walking Backward into the Future. Here, Netsky continues his innovative exploration of materials and themes well known from his seminal 1992 ICA exhibition, Time Flies. This earlier work, created during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, courageously explored the intersections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic with contemporary domestic life, popular culture, and Western art history. During Netsky’s retrospective in 2006, Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Curator Sid Sachs described Netsky as having a practice that, “operates at the nexus of social representation and sculpture, sexual cliché, and self-presentation. Echoing a variety of historical styles such as Pop Art, Pattern and Decoration, and color field, Netsky retains a crisp classical sense of craft and sense of humor that is deadly serious.” His latest work is no exception as Netsky continues with a clear-eyed honesty and queer sensibility.
