Andrew Edlin Gallery

Unaccompanied Conversations explores the work of three artists: the now acclaimed Outsider James Castle, Pearl Blauvelt, and John Byam, all of whom were untrained and from modest circumstances, yet developed unique approaches to their art using unconventional materials. And they all devoted their lives to their art in the face of little or no market support. Besides their exceptional talent, these artists all shared traits of neurodiversity. They did not process information the way most people do, or hold “normal” conversations, even the banal—like commenting on the weather. But viewing the works of Castle, Blauvelt, and Byam can be like overhearing the conversations, often deep, sometimes funny, frequently intense, but always unusual, that have played out in the artists’ minds.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Vahakn Arslanian, his fifth with the gallery. The show features recent works made by the artist during the pandemic, including paintings of birds, planes and a customized motorcycle. Nonverbal and partially deaf since birth—he can hear the roar of airplane engines and the high-pitched chirping of birds—Arslanian was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder at age four, yet nothing has stood in the way of his unstoppable drive to create. He has been a productive, exhibiting artist working on his own for the past thirty years.

Over the past four decades, Knight has executed her idiosyncratic visons of UFO related imagery with the stubborn persistence of an artist unbeholden to the dictates of art world trends, although contemporary interest in spiritualist art has certainly offered a favorable context. Knight’s relationship with what might be broadly termed “the occult” is rooted in her upbringing; her father authored publications on, among other subjects, UFOs and ghosts, and her grandfather, also a writer, penned a book about afterlife communication.

While Paulina Peavy’s (1901-1999) life spanned the twentieth century, her art and belief system represent a crucible for our current moment. She challenged gender norms and racial divides, revitalized hermetic and matriarchal systems, embraced cult traditions, and played a vital role in a community of groundbreaking artists. She saw herself as an emissary, a messenger for advanced beings contextualized through the phenomenon of UFOs. A radical innovator, Peavy would become the first established fine artist to be publicly associated with the movement known as astroculture.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present …It Isn’t Even Past, its fourth solo exhibition for Scottish-born, New York City artist Tom Duncan (b. 1939), featuring his intricately constructed, mixed-media sculptures. Duncan explores the intertwined nature of personal and public history. Events of the Second World War—air raids over Britain, the execution of Private Eddie Slovik—are rendered within the visual language and aesthetic sensibility of a young boy consumed by Catholicism, comic books, and the depredations of history.

When book designer Mark Holborn asked William Eggleston, “But what have you been taking pictures of?” the renowned photographer replied, “I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.” Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a group of small-scale works by eight contemporary painters: Charis Ammon, Thiago Hattnher, Leonard Baby, Jennifer J. Lee, TJ Rinoski, Nicholas Bierk, John Joseph Mitchell, and Kate Wallace. Their imagery evokes the essence of Eggleston’s picture-making as described by curator John Szarkowski (1925-2007) in his foreword to the catalogue that accompanied MoMA’s 1976 exhibition, William Eggleston’s Guide: “A picture is, after all only a picture, a concrete kind of fiction, not to be admitted as hard evidence or as the quantifiable data of social scientists. As pictures, however, these seem to me perfect: irreducible surrogates for the experience they pretend to record, visual analogues for the quality of one life, collectively a paradigm of a private view, a view one would have thought ineffable, described here with clarity, fullness, and elegance."

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to present Tip of the Iceberg, its first solo exhibition for George Widener since announcing its representation of the artist earlier this year. The show offers a twenty-two-year overview of Widener’s oeuvre, which made a remarkable entry into the art world around the turn of the millennium, seemingly from out of nowhere.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce "Terence Koh: Starting Now," the artist's first solo show with the gallery in seven years. The show features miniature artworks and monochromatic diaries completed between 2020 until the present.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of rarely seen works by Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) from two distinct periods in her life – her early years as an abstract expressionist painter in New York City and her later return to her roots in art inspired by her complex views on the rural South.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to announce a solo exhibition for Ray Materson (b.1954), his first in New York since 1996. The exhibition will feature approximately thirty-five artworks that date from the nineties up until today.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to present Joe Coleman: 100 Seconds to Midnight, an exhibition of four works related to the artist’s ongoing practice of self-portraiture and centered around his newest piece, The Sorcerer’s Mirror at 100 Seconds to Midnight, which took five years to complete and makes its debut here.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to present an invitational group exhibition of works by artists who are either based in Montreal or represented there in local galleries and museums. Working in diverse media, from small ceramic or papier-mâché objects to intricate assemblages and collages to large oil paintings, these seventeen individuals come from many different backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities: contemporary, self-taught, First Nations, Inuit, Quebecois, Anglophone, Congolese, Croatian, German, Italian, Romanian, Russian. Their reputations range from celebrated (eight have had solo museum shows) to emerging, to even obscure, but all of them epitomize the vibrant multicultural spirit of Montreal.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present three visionary artists whose various metaphysical interests and practices–such as alchemy, Jungian psychology, spiritualism and psychic automatism–unite them across time and location. Ann McCoy and Olga Spiegel currently live and work in New York City, while Paulina Peavy (1901-1999) was primarily a West Coast artist who also lived and exhibited in New York. Paulina Peavy’s extraordinary body of work includes such diverse media as painting, mixed media works on paper, and film, as well as mask-making, crafted as a means of better accessing the psychic energy of her alien spirit guide, Lacamo. Like other significant modern artists who channeled otherworldly spirits (e.g. Hilma af Klint, Madge Gill, Marjorie Cameron) in order to convey messages deemed significant for humanity, Peavy utilized a combination of abstract and natural forms. In an untitled oil on board executed between 1930-1960 (she rarely dated her work), the artist mixed fluid organic shapes with a pair of praying hands which emerge from nocturnal darkness, flickering in luminous colors like apparitions from another realm. A set of three oils from her Phantasma series, c. 1980, contain graphically bold symbolic forms that pulsate with vibrant color and energetic lines that call to mind such Transcendentalist painters as Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson. Showing for the first time at the gallery is Ann McCoy (b. 1946), a New York-based artist whose long career as a painter, print maker, sculptor, art critic, and teacher has focused on the spiritual content of art history and art making. McCoy has studied alchemy since the early seventies when she was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1989, which allowed her to work with alchemical collections at the Vatican Library. For over twenty years she studied in Zurich with Carl Alfred Meier, Carl Gustav Jung’s heir apparent. She incorporated her knowledge of Jung’s psychological writings on alchemy into artwork that explored her own dreams and unconscious. She joins a significant group of artists working with alchemical imagery and ideas (including Joseph Beuys, whom she knew in Berlin), and the three works in this exhibition reflect her on-going explorations into this topic. In her large-scale pencil drawings, McCoy’s surfaces contain intricate layers of mysterious objects, landscapes, animals, and symbols that are rendered in exquisite detail and rise up like images in a dream. Her mural-size drawing Dream of the Invisible College (2018) features a sleeping woman levitating in the center as various alchemical apparatuses (an alembic distilling gold, a heated athanor) surround her in a nocturnal sky. Birds’ wings, haloed heads, skulls, and even a mummy here hint of psychological and spiritual life cycles. The artist tellingly explains, “Dreams are linked to the transformation process described in alchemical symbolism, the Alchemical Great Work…. My work strives to reaffirm the dream world’s place as a source of wisdom.” Olga Spiegel (b.1943) was born in France while her family was in hiding after fleeing Belgium during the war. She moved to New York City in 1964. Nurtured by psychedelic art, surrealism and science fiction, Spiegel has created a unique visual language where she can present, in her own words, “…spaces of wonder that point to ever changing notions of the Universe and our sense of Being….” The oil paintings in this exhibition span the 1960s to 2010, revealing the full spectrum of her styles and imagery. In Seed (1967-68) a phantasmagoric cloud of swarming shapes and colors, both opaque and translucent, appears to flow directly from the artist’s hand in the manner of psychic automatism, a technique pioneered by surrealism, but borrowed from spiritualism. Jam Session (1968) has the same biomorphic stream, but with a fresh and vibrant use of color that reflects the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Merging multiple dimensions, the human figures in Watching the Light (1985) experience literal enlightenment while meditating in an ordinary room that dissipates before our eyes. The most recent work in the show, A Window and a Mirror (2010), is an update of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), a reclining nude figure floats between a window and a mirror, two magical portals into the unknown. Drenched in pulsating hues of scarlet, the sleeper is enmeshed in a dense nest of interlocking tubular forms and floating blue orbs – it is as if we are within the human body itself, or even the very fabric of life. Spiegel’s mastery over a variety of styles reveals an artist who has never hesitated to explore and expand her oeuvre. Although widely exhibited in her lifetime, Paulina Peavy was relegated to obscurity until fairly recently. Her work has found a renewed and ever-expanding appreciation, and last year was included in Greater New York at MoMA P.S.1, Supernatural America curated by Robert Cozzolino at the Minneapolis Art Institute, and her solo exhibition An Etherian Channeler curated by Laura Whitcomb at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. Andrew Edlin Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Peavy’s work at the forthcoming ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, November 2-6, 2022. Peavy’s art is in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, Washington DC. Ann McCoy was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1989 and has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2019), the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2017, 1998, 1993), and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1996), among others. Her work is in many museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She has served as a professor of art history at Barnard College and the Yale School of Drama and is currently an art critic and editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail. Olga Spiegel studied briefly at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts in Brussels before enrolling at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London from 1962 to 1964. In 1973, she attended a seminar at the School of Fantastic Realism in Vienna with artist Ernst Fuchs. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently, earlier this year in the New York-based group shows Field Trip: Psychedelic Solution, 1986-1995 curated by Fred Tomaselli at the Outsider Art Fair and Psychedelic Landscape at Eric Firestone Gallery. - Susan L. Aberth

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of works by Della Wells (b. 1951).When Della Wells began to devote herself to making art at age forty-two, she embarked on a journey to create strikingly emotive works that merge her personal narrative with sociopolitical realities. Born in Milwaukee at the height of the Civil Rights era, Wells’ scenes recall in her art the cacophony of her midwestern upbringing––defined by her fractured home life, the palpable political climate, and the vibrant ethos of Black artistic culture.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition for Esther Pearl Watson. The gallery featured her work in the 2018-19 group exhibition April 14, 1561 and more recently in the 2021 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Featuring approximately twenty previously unseen works released by her estate, Runway will the first solo exhibition for self-taught artist Helen Rae (1938-2021) since her recent passing at the age of eighty-three. Her subject is ostensibly the fashion and advertising photographs that she uses for inspiration. She translates these commoditized depictions of beauty and glamour in ways that create rhapsodic distortions and reveal a profound level of personal identification.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition for Tom Bronk (b. 1944), featuring works created since the onset of the pandemic. Visual sophistication abounds in these paintings. They are pictorially smart and sharp, commanding the eye with a deft choreography of line and geometry, fearless in their intense color combinations.

The second solo exhibition for Karla Knight, "Road Trip" features recent paintings, drawings, and tapestries, incorporating her trademark ancient and space age imagery interspersed with the enigmatic characters that comprise her invented written language. Image: Karla Knight (b. 1958) "Red Road Trip 1," 2021 Flashe, acrylic marker, pencil, and embroidery on cotton 56.5 x 77.5 inches

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present its second Dan Miller (b. 1961) solo exhibition featuring nine recent large-scale compositions. For 30 years, Miller has created enigmatic text-based abstractions consisting of dense layerings of letters, symbols, and words. The artist, who is both autistic and largely non-verbal, records in the works his thoughts and interests, specifically relating to mechanics (lightbulbs, fans and electrical sockets) as well as the names of cities he has visited, people to whom he is close, and foods he enjoys.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Domenico Zindato, the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Best known for his masterfully elaborate and vibrant pastel and ink drawings, Zindato (b.1966) continues to expand on the unique visual lexicon he has been developing for nearly 30 years, filling his compositions with layered patterns and recurring motifs which serve as the main ingredients of his mesmerizing topographies.

Announcing the first show for the artist since the gallery's representation of the estate. Curated by Dan Nadel, this career-spanning retrospective will include unique drawings for comics alongside sketchbooks, paintings, and ephemera.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present the first New York solo exhibition of French artist Marcel Bascoulard (1913-1978), featuring a series of photographic self-portraits created over the course of three decades. A painter, poet, designer, photographer and illustrator, Bascoulard inhabited an idiosyncratic universe of his own making. Though he left behind a diverse body of work, the photographs he took of himself dressed in elaborate feminine attire are the most intriguing, mysterious, and well-known.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by self-taught Italian artist Elisabetta Zangrandi. From a young age Zangrandi has painted on any surface available to her – rocks, bottles, wood, plants. Inspired by her love of nature and the sweeping landscape visible from her home, her pictures are colorful worlds of fantasy, often involving princesses and fantastical creatures. Although dissociated from the professional art world, she has long admired the work of Italian Renaissance masters and French Impressionists.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of watercolor drawings by New Orleans artist Roy Ferdinand (1959-2004), known locally during his lifetime as the “Goya of the ghetto” for his grisly, realistic depictions of life during the crack wars of the 1990s. The show features roughly twenty-five works made between 1989 and 2004, and marks the first New York solo exhibition for the artist.

Featuring anonymous folk and vernacular objects, and artworks by self-taught artists Eugene Andolsek, Charles Benefiel, Larry Calkins, JJ Cromer, Curtis Cuffie, Daniel Martin Diaz, Sam Gant, Edward Nagrodzki, Robert Sholties, Ionel Talpazan, Terry Turrell and Purvis Young.

Bruce Bickford: The Uplands Curated by Eric White July 12 – August 13, 2021 Andrew Edlin Gallery 212 Bowery New York NY 10012 Electric Lady Studios 52 W 8th Street New York 10011 By appointment only Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present the first New York gallery exhibition of drawings by celebrated artist Bruce Bickford (1947-2019). Best known for his groundbreaking 1970s stopmotion animations for Frank Zappa, Bickford was a prolific independent animator and illustrator whose legacy of films, graphic novels, and drawings are rooted in a narrative blend of B-movies, advertising icons, war, alternate histories and paranormal phenomena. The Uplands presents works created from 2012 until the artist’s passing and includes a series focused on the structure of Bickford’s fictional Pacific-Northwest landscape; outtakes from his graphic novel Vampire Picnic; and a suite of images depicting Zappa himself, which will be displayed at Electric Lady Studios where the musician recorded part of his renowned 1974 album Apostrophe’. A series of his graphite-on-paper animations will be screening at both exhibitions. Bickford’s drawings, like his perpetual motion animations, depict a reality that was constantly unfolding in front of him. Much of this is evident in the Uplands, about which he wrote: “Several cults and interest groups exist in the Uplands, but the main society there has been quite stable for centuries, dating back to the early Viking settlements. Fortunately for them, there is a power that hovers over the Uplands, a barely visible shroud of energy which prevents the usage of modern electronic devices.” These drawings function as articulate, seemingly objective descriptions of Bickford’s universe of ideas because his mechanical pencil strokes never vary in width and seem as sure-footed as the lines made by an engineer carefully delineating a gear shift. They are unaffected, objective, like the early animation pioneer Winsor McCay or the contemporary surrealist Jim Shaw. And then the strange creeps in. Bruce Bickford was raised in Seattle, Washington, the son of a Boeing engineer. He and his brothers grew up with a lust for action and a love of movies. “Fantasy,” Bickford said, “is usually about perfecting your imperfect life.” His imperfect life included enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1966 followed by an eleven-month stint in Vietnam. Upon returning home in 1969, Bickford threw himself into filmmaking. Impressed by Frank Zappa’s film 200 Motels (1971) and having completed numerous clay animation sequences of his own, in 1973, he sought out the musician in Los Angeles. In his lengthy creative partnership with Zappa, he producedmultiple films and animation sequences. From 1981 until his passing in April 2019, Bickford made his own films, some of which were screened internationally, and in later years created stand-alone images and graphic novels. Though he rarely spoke of influences outside of cinema, a link can be traced between Bickford and cartoonists and animators such as Robert Crumb and Victor Moscoso, who share his fascination with the endless mutability of the body and space; and with H.R. Giger, who built a fictional world with scaffolding so elaborate that the viewer or reader might only see the surface. But when we step back to look at Bickford’s drawings, it’s the Belgian master James Ensor who looms over the activity: the woozy lines, the deftly orchestrated parades of beings, the obsession with what lies beneath, and shimmering colors. In Bickford’s world, each image is the manifestation of a living consciousness that he is both generating and documenting, producing equal parts wonder and bafflement. Bruce Bickford (1947-2019) is widely considered a pioneer and master of clay animation, creating uniquely bizarre narratives in perpetually morphing plasticine. Although primarily known for his clay and line animation, the artist spent much of his later life creating intricate paintings, drawings, graphic novels, and sculptural objects. The artist gained a cult following in the 1970s when his animations were featured extensively in the films of Frank Zappa, including Baby Snakes (1979), The Dub Room Special (1982) and The Amazing Mr. Bickford (1987). Subsequently, he produced his most highly regarded piece, the award-winning 1988 feature Prometheus' Garden, as well as his final film, CAS’L’ (2015). In 2004 he was the subject of an award-winning feature-length documentary Monster Road by Brett Ingram. More recently, some of Bickford’s last works, as well as a sequence of never-before-seen animation from the 70s, appeared in Alex Winter’s documentary feature Zappa (2020). Eric White (b.1968) is an artist currently based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums around the world. He is represented by Grimm Gallery in New York and Amsterdam.

Parallel Phenomena compares and contrasts the distinct yet related worlds these four artists have constructed and woven into being with graphite, colored pencil and watercolor. Every paper surface becomes the territory for a series of eccentrically fueled and compulsively composed narratives, each distinguished by a level of figurative distortion that bears the unmistakable signature of its author. By exploring the compositional and conceptual connective tissue among the works of Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson and Peter Saul, one can trace the mysterious phenomena of unorchestrated communal responses to deeply held individual impulses or needs. Through this clarifying process one can simultaneously highlight individual inspiration and celebrate the shared instincts and aesthetic parallels. Composite Image Caption: Carroll Dunham (b. 1949), Land (detail), 1998, graphite on paper, 15 x 21.5 inches. Courtesy of the Artist; Private Collection, Connecticut. Photo Kevin Nobel. Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940), Blue Glass (detail), 1985, watercolor on paper, 21.75 x 41.75 inches. Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery. Susan Te Kahurangi King (b. 1951), Untitled (detail), c. 1965-70, graphite and colored pencil on found paper, 12.5 x 10 inches. Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery and The Susan Te Kahurangi King Trust. Photo Nicolas Knight. Peter Saul (b. 1934), Untitled (detail), 1962, crayon on paper, 35 x 39 inches. Courtesy KAWS Inc. © 2021 Peter Saul / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Farzad Owrang.

The work of African American artist Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015), which drew from her childhood memories and subsequent travels in Georgia and the Carolinas, pays tribute to the vestiges of Southern Black heritage, and, in the process, offers a distinctive view of the rich culture of this often overlooked segment of rural American life.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present "Homebody," an installation by Abigail DeVille. DeVille's body of work is centered around the cosmologies of marginalized people and places. "Homebody" explores the legacy of homemaking and displacement through her family's experiences in the Great Migration. In the 1930s, DeVille's family moved north from Richmond, Virginia, landing first in Harlem and later, in the 1950s, the Bronx. This project was inspired as a dialogue with the gallery's concurrent show, Shacks and Legends, 1985-2011, a solo exhibition by Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015), which is presented in the adjacent space.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to present “The Double-Sided Dominions of Henry Darger,” the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the gallery in over a decade. The show features nine double-sided watercolor drawings, eighteen compositions in all, which were originally hand-bound by the artist into at least three separate gigantic pictorial albums. They represent three distinct periods of Darger’s development and trace the evolution of his art from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present "Notes from the Lightship," an exhibition of new work by Karla Knight. Knight’s first solo show with the gallery features visionary paintings and drawings made over the past three years.

"Joe Coleman and The Shadow Self" surveys the past twenty-five years of the artist’s degenerate and deviant portraiture. Coleman's subjects are at once subjective and self-reflexive; contemplations of the other as reflections of his own identity and abiding sense of humanity. Whether self-portraits, depictions of his friends or––with the greatest affection, his wife and muse Whitney Ward––or invocations of infamy like the insurrectionist abolitionist John Brown, the medieval composer Carlo Gesualdo, who murdered his wife and her lover and then put them on display, or Swift Runner, the Cree hunter, who when facing starvation as a result of the alien European extinction of the buffalo murdered and cannibalized his family, Coleman’s art is painted with an impassioned degree of love and understanding that is rare and somewhat reviled in the profession of fine art.

There are few figures in the world of arts and culture who have conjured a worldview so fully complete in its internal logic and yet as terrifyingly radical as Paulina Peavy (1901-1999). Peavy’s artwork, writings and films appear to those of us mired in conventional reality as unhinged. She painted while wearing a mask and served as a channel for a being she described as her personal “UFO,” a highly evolved teacher from the future named Lacamo. The ability Lacamo gave her to see past and future helped make her artwork indescribable and breathtaking in its sumptuous timelessness and world-making, or perhaps world-saving, ambition.