Opening This Weekend:
Douglas Martenson: The Meadow, Encounter
Save the Date • Opening Reception:
Saturday, March 21, 1-4 pm
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Gallery Hours:
Fridays & Saturdays, 11 am – 4 pm, or by appointment.
215-665-8138 / Inquiries: info@grossmccleaf.com
Parking available in The Mill Studios lot via Leverington Avenue
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Orchard Tree, Oil on wood, 20″ x 16″
Douglas Martenson: The Meadow, Encounter
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21, 1 - 4 pm
March 20 - April 25
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present The Meadow, Encounter, a new solo exhibition by Douglas Martenson.
In The Meadow, Encounter, Douglas Martenson returns to a meadow he knows well, but it never stays the same. Working across oil, watercolor, and graphite, he paints from sustained observation, following what changes: a brief shift in light, a growing density of leaves, a path worn into the ground.
Each image carries the feeling of a chance encounter, as though stumbled upon rather than composed, drawing the viewer into a moment already shifting. Wide fields give way to closer moments, where what might otherwise be passed over begins to take hold as the subject. What remains are images that invite viewers to look closely, to notice, and to arrive at something that feels both familiar and newly recognized.
Formality, Oil on canvas over panel, 24″ x 18″
Marilyn Holsing: On Longing
February 13 - March 21
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present On Longing, a new solo exhibition by Marilyn Holsing. In this body of work, Holsing begins each painting with a colored ground of layered hues, building from that base until flora, tendrils, and shadowy environments take shape. Influenced by her work with dioramas and glass cloches, she studies how light reflects, distorts, and obscures, and how a surface can both reveal and conceal what lies within.
Holsing’s recent work grew out of an exploration of bell jars, objects that both protect and confine. In earlier dioramas, she encased sculptural figures within glass vessels, observing how reflections fracture space and alter perception. “Encasing these things in glass highlights their preciousness and their need to be protected from everyday life,” she explains. The paintings extend this investigation, imagining landscapes within containers and testing how interior and exterior space collapse into one another. The cloche becomes both vessel and boundary, a space in which life feels suspended or, in author Susan Stewart’s words, “arrested.” What appears delicate is deliberately set apart and made significant through its detachment.
Explore our curated selection of artworks from current and past exhibitions.
All works listed are available for direct purchase online.
We have moved!
We’re delighted to announce that Gross McCleaf Gallery has relocated to the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia, in The Mill Studios - just off Main Street at the Belmont exit from I-76.
This new location meets the moment in today’s shifting art market while benefiting GMG, our artists, and loyal clients. At its 3rd site in 55 years, Gross McCleaf will continue providing a comfortable, convenient setting to engage with your favorite art & artists and now includes free and easy parking!
I am excited for Gross McCleaf's new phase and look forward to seeing you soon in our new location!
Rebecca Segall
Owner & Director
Gross McCleaf Gallery
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Elizabeth Johnson: ...Have you felt your identity as an artist shift in relation to nature since Resilience?
Douglas Martenson: Yes. And as a person too. We get so much of our identity from how others perceive us, engage with us. This parallels the way I perceive the meadow: it exists already but when I represent it, it then becomes known through me as an artist. I am always seeing something more, going deeper, finding ways to relate this uncommon subject to a broader audience. I love the idea of a chance encounter, inviting the viewer into a moment that is already changing. Nothing stays the same. Currently, everything in the world is in transition, each day brings new events to deal with. These paintings are speaking of the complexity of what it takes to render light and make marks necessary to create lifelike images.
Elizabeth Johnson: ...Your pieces curve forms like the warp created by Photoshop, cameras, and computers. Cézanne broke his subjects into geometric forms to make space. How does your work relate to or differ from his? Does working in continuous curving space like digital images made of billions of bits of information link you to the digital age?
Peter Van Dyck: No, not to the digital age per se. But I do think that painting can be seen as creative information processing. My understanding of Cézanne is that he saw the world through the lens of simplified geometric solids, and I am a hundred percent sympathetic to that way of understanding the physical and visual world. In fact, I find it almost impossible to register any experience without first engaging it in a tactile, volumetric way. It seems to me that Cézanne is not constrained by this need for a dominant, almost tyrannical organizational structure...
