Greg Kucera Gallery

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition of work by Oregon artist Christopher Derek Bruno. His work is an ongoing investigation into what happens between a source of visual stimuli and the mind. This inquiry is driven by the belief that understanding visual perception may offer insight into broader principles that shape the human experience. Bruno focuses on translucent media, incorporating CAD, model-making, printmaking, and CNC production to create work that uses color and light in intriguing abstract compositions.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our fourth exhibition by Seattle artist, Anthony White. In this exhibition, titled Somethin’ Somethin’, the artist explores media and its influence on our society. Influenced by the Vanitas tradition of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch painting, White invites viewers to explore how images of people and objects come together and gather meaning through a contemporary lens. White manually extrudes strands of a 3-D printing ink, PolyLactic Acid (PLA,) through a pen-like tool onto wood panels. The resulting works’ labor-intensive process contrasts with the mass production methods used to manufacture the objects he depicts. “I reframe painting’s relationship with technology, blurring the boundaries between painting and digital process-based practices by building compositions that weave ubiquitous objects, technological motifs, and historical and literary allusions to reflect the complexities of contemporary life. These layered narratives explore how objects interact with their environments, how seemingly mundane moments carry deeper significance, and how our existence is mediated through digital and consumerist culture.” –Anthony White Biography White (born 1994) received his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2018. He has participated in curated, thematic and one-person exhibitions locally, nationally, and in Europe. He was awarded the 2021 Betty Bowen Award and had a one-person exhibition, Limited Warranty, at Seattle Art Museum in 2022/2023. He was awarded Second Prize in the 2018 XL Catlin exhibition, juried by prominent international museum curators, at the New York Academy of Art, in NYC. His work is in the collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. White lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Among the 20th century’s most important artists, Jacob Lawrence documented the African-American experience and the life of the working man. This exhibition of twelve prints includes works from the Builders series, “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture” suite depicting scenes from the life of the 18th century Haitian general, and others from throughout his career, including his first two prints. BIOGRAPHY: Born in 1917, Jacob Lawrence gained national recognition at the age of 23 for MIGRATION SERIES, a 60 panel series of paintings depicting the Great Migration of African-Americans that migrated from the rural South to the urban North from between 1916 and 1970. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Seattle Art Museum; Jacob Lawrence: The Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman Series of 1938-40, organized by the Hampton University Museum in Virginia; and Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, organized jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A major retrospective exhibition, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, originated in 2001 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Seattle Art Museum. His work is in the collections of museums around the world.

The Gallery is pleased to present our first one-person exhibition by Seattle artist Holly Ballard Martz. The title for this exhibition, Past Perfect Future Tense, is a sly reference to society’s reverence of youth (one’s past is perfect) and its fraught relationship to growing old (one’s future is tense.) Incorporating a variety of materials, ranging from vintage quilts remnants to disposable injection needles to detachable bra straps, the artist creates sculpture that confronts assumptions about aging, particularly for women. “This exhibition is a love letter to myself, and, in being so, is my attempt to reframe the insidious narrative around aging so that I may embrace the shifting topography of my body… Thinking about the loss of skin elasticity and the effects of gravity on that skin led me to explore the utility of bra straps and lead weights, combining them to create an embellished “skin” that is dimpled and sagging, tagged and discolored, but beautiful.” -Holly Ballard Martz Biography: Holly Ballard Martz received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Washington. The artist has exhibited extensively and her work is held in many prominent collections, including the Gates Foundation, Bainbridge Museum of Art, University of Washington, and Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas/UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico. She is the recipient of a McMillen Foundation Fellowship, an Artist Trust Grant for Artist Projects, a Seattle Office of Arts and Culture CityArtist Grant, and she was a 2022 Neddy Artist Award Finalist. She lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present its fifth one-person show of work from the estate of Michael Dailey. Since the artist's passing in 2009, his wife and daughter have periodically discovered paintings and works on paper within his studio. These discoveries have offered glimpses into his ongoing artistic legacy. Many of the works in this exhibition come from a stack of small works on paper they found in a box tucked away in the studio’s many recesses. Dailey used these pieces to explore different ideas for his landscapes. While few directly correlate to his larger paintings, you can see how certain sections eventually evolved into elements of his works on canvas. Biography: Michael Dailey was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1938. He received BA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa.  From 1963 until 1998 he taught painting and drawing in the School of Art at the University of Washington. In 2008, Michael Dailey’s work was the subject of a retrospective, curated by John Olbrantz, at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. Previous one-person exhibitions include a 2002 retrospective at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington, and early surveys at Tacoma Art Museum (1975, 1966); University of Idaho, Moscow (1974); University of Wisconsin, Madison (1967); and State University of New York, Alfred (1963). Public collections in which his work is included are Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; Portland Art Museum; and University of Washington. After retiring from the School of Art at University of Washington, Michael Dailey continued to live and work in Seattle until his death in 2009.

We are pleased to announce our fifth one-person exhibition by Seattle artist, Susan Skilling. Skilling is the kind of artist who is led by her inner voice and not by the dictates of fashion or the marketplace. Nonetheless, her work has maintained contemporary concerns in painting. Susan Skilling's new works continue her exploration of nature and landscape through spare, elegant watercolor and gouache paintings on paper. Her formal choices are imbued with an organic sensitivity, reminiscent of artists like Morris Graves and Anne Appleby. Skilling's selection of imagery, color, and content evokes a pursuit of the sublime. Using mineral-based paints, some handmade, Skilling creates a dense layering of subtly nuanced color on rich handmade paper. Her somber, modest palette is punctuated by occasional highlights of brilliant, saturated color, revealing her intimate engagement with her materials. Biography: Susan Skilling received her MFA from the University of Washington. She has exhibited in the Northwest since 1977. Skilling’s work has been collected by the City of Seattle, City Light Collection; Boeing Corporation, Chicago; Wild Ginger Restaurant, Seattle; and Microsoft Art Collection. She has been included in exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner; and the Bellevue Arts Museum. Skilling lives and works in Seattle, WA. 

In addition to working with and promoting emerging, nationally established, and Northwest artists through one-person exhibitions, we are also active curators of exhibitions of unique works and editions from many other important contemporary artists. Since 2015, when we closed our resale gallery, ArtREsource, we continue to find the need to sell or the desire to buy secondary market artwork is as strong as it ever was. With this show, Our Semi-occasional Exhibition of Secondary Market Offerings, we hope to reconnect with gallery-goers who miss ArtREsource’s wonderful collection of rarely seen offerings. With Work By: Guy Anderson Francis Bacon Ross Palmer Beecher Gregory Blackstock Deborah Butterfield Kenneth Callahan Michael Dailey Sonia Delaunay Richard Diebenkorn Jim Dine Eric Fischl Helen Frankenthaler Morris Graves Dimitri Hadzi Jane Hammond Paul Horiuchi William Ivey Fay Jones Norman Lundin Alden Mason Henri Matisse Henry Moore Robert Motherwell Manuel Neri Frank Okada Mimmo Paladino Robert Rauschenberg Susan Rothenberg Richard Serra Roger Shimomura Michael C. Spafford Darren Waterston William Wegman Terry Winters among others...

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our eleventh one-person exhibition of work by Seattle artist, Mark Calderon. Initially created as a collection of beaded textiles, each expressing words of apology, the exhibition is titled There’s Always Glimmer. In the end, with the addition of the mirrored work, it embraces hope. “There are things in all of our pasts—recent and long ago—that we can apologize for. I felt that the show needed a counterpoint to the message of sadness and regret. The mirrored sculpture Glimmer is a bright and hopeful work intended as an uplifting refuge. It is my responsibility to keep alive at least a glimmer. "Apologizing is a powerful act. Its depth of feeling, of caring, of thoughtfulness, is what ultimately interests me. What can we do? An apology is a way to begin.” –Mark Calderon Biography Mark Calderon was born in Bakersfield, CA. He received his BA from San Jose State University. The artist has received several “Seattle Artists” awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and been awarded many public commissions throughout the country. He has been the recipient of artist grants from Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York; Artist Trust, Seattle and Art Matters, New York as well as the Seattle Art Museum’s 1986 Betty Bowen Award recipient. Calderon’s work is included in several prominent public and private collections, including: Boise Art Museum, ID; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art Museum, WA. Clark College, Vancouver, WA; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; SAFECO Corporation, Seattle and Boeing Corporation, Chicago, IL.

As we move towards shorter and darker days, Greg Kucera Gallery presents Light Switch, an exhibition made with, about, and in reference to light in its many forms. The concept for this thematic group show was initially inspired by Margie Livingston's STRUCTURE (autumn blue). On the artist’s studio wall, the seasonal fall light cast a blue shadow. Struck by this shade of blue, the artist used it as a starting point in her painting. And, as timing would have it, this show coincides with scaffolding erected in late September on the sidewalk in front of Greg Kucera Gallery. It will remain there for the next several months as windows are replaced on the building’s facade. The scaffolding blocks the gallery windows from the warm waning light of the shortening Fall days. This installation will be light therapy for us. We hope it is for you too.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our eleventh one-person exhibition of work by Seattle artist, Peter Millett. Welded in steel, the recent sculptures are powder coated in a a series of subdued grey and silvers. Millett continues to explore the flip side of the mass and weight of his work in Corten steel. This work embraces open shapes having less sense of mass or weight; no inside or outside, just pure gesture. In contrast to the bursts of color he employed in his 2020 exhibition, this collection of sculptures exists in a much more subdued color scheme. The muted tones reference shadow, reflections, and moonlight. Silver, white, and varying shades of grey, create an exhibition that is calm and reflective. The triangular components that serve as the the sculptural building blocks twist and turn, folding in upon each other in quiet meditation. This exhibition is in conjunction with the artist’s retrospective, Peter Millett: Building Forms, showing at Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, WA, October 12, 2024 - January 12, 2025. The exhibition is the artist’s first museum survey, presenting artworks from Northwest private and museum collections in a review of Millett’s expansive body of work. An accompanying catalog of the exhibition will also be available with an introduction by MoNA Executive Director and Chief Curator, Stefano Catalani, and an essay by Greg Bell, the curator of the exhibition. BIOGRAPHY Peter Millett was born in 1949 in Evanston, IL and resides in Seattle. He received his BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA at University of Washington. His work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond; Tacoma Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The artist lives and works in Seattle.

The Gallery is excited to present our ninth one-person exhibition by Washington artist Claudia Fitch. The show’s title, Models and Messengers, refers to how we choose to present ourselves in our public life. We are models, walking the city streets like a runway, wearing our chosen patterns and designs. We are also messengers, using the clothes we wear to convey information about ourselves. “As if in an imaginary city center, stepping out on the street with bright plumage and sartorial flair, they are bearing messages, both personal and public. The figures are also shaped by selected images from the media stream. Human life on the street can be simultaneously ubiquitous and monumental, contemporary and ancient.” –Claudia Fitch The exhibition’s centerpiece is a 10 foot by 10 foot neon hummingbird, a prototype for a public sculpture commissioned for the Lynnwood City Center Rail Station. Based on the beautiful Anna’s Hummingbird, common to the Pacific Northwest, the sculpture’s neon lights mimic the bird’s iridescent feathers and jewel-like appearance. Biography Fitch received her BFA in painting from the University of Washington, Seattle and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. The artist was awarded the 2014 Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. In 2011, the WSU Museum of Art produced a major one-person show of her work. In 2012, she had a one-person show at Portland Art Museum as a part of the APEX Gallery series. Past honors include the Art + Architecture Fellowship at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and a NEA Fellowship in Visual Arts in Sculpture. Her 1995 one-person exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum was an exploration of the relationship between architecture and the theme of gardens and topiary. Fitch has produced large-scale public commissions for the First Hill Streetcar and CenturyLink Field. She has exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, as well as a number of university and gallery spaces across the country. Her work is included in several important collections including the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Arts Commission, Spokane Museum of Art, and Microsoft Corporation.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to present our first one-person exhibition by Washington artist David Hytone. In work that is constructed by many individual pieces of hand-painted paper, the artist employs a laborious process of collage and painting, glass-plate dry paint transfer and mono print techniques. The resulting images appear compromised or incomplete, like distant memories. “I have been thinking about the notion of the self as an aggregate of separate identities, cobbled loosely together from the different performances we present as we move from one societal construct to another. What I find equally compelling is how memory informs and is informed by this action. I am also intrigued with the idea of reality as performance. Studies in quantum physics such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle have suggested that light and matter behave differently depending on whether or not they are being observed. A poetic reading of this renders the world around us essentially a facade or something akin to a shifting theater set.” 
–David Hytone Biography David Hytone received his BFA in Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after studying briefly at the Osaka University of Arts in Osaka, Japan. He has exhibited in one-person and group exhibitions in Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Portland, Sun Valley, and Ghent, Belgium. He has work in numerous private and corporate collections including Microsoft, Facebook, Capital One, Swedish Hospital, Hilton Hotel and the permanent collection of King County, WA. He was a finalist for the 2018 Neddy Award in Painting.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our tenth one-person exhibition, titled Warm Fusion, by Seattle artist Jeffrey Simmons. The artist’s current paintings continue to explore symmetrical, patterned abstractions through a variety of techniques. Employing brayers, spackling knives, squeegees, and stencils, Simmons creates compositions from layers of thin, transparent pigment or crudely ground particles of iron oxide suspended in acrylic medium. “I apply elements of decorative patterning—derived from ink blots, textiles, stained glass, mosaic, wrought iron, and turned wood—towards formal and expressive ends. The descriptor "decorative" has historically been a pejorative in art criticism, particularly when applied to "serious" abstraction; yet classical abstract painting always shared meaningful elements with crafts that embrace the term more willingly, these elements being shallow pictorial space, non-hierarchical composition, and a predilection towards repetition, among other things. Various historical subsets of abstraction, including 1970s Pattern and Decoration, explored this overlap. An indirect, and deliberately imprecise, paint application technique allows for accident and variation within the rigid structure of each pattern. Throughout the process of making this exhibition, a guiding principle was "welcome mishap.” Voids, blobs, and misaligned colors all serve to activate and enliven the surface of these works.” –Jeffrey Simmons BIOGRAPHY Jeffrey Simmons received his BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. He has been exhibiting in the Northwest since 1995. Simmons was awarded the Betty Bowen Committee Special Recognition Award by the Seattle Art Museum in 1996. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the University of Washington, the Microsoft Corporation, among others.

Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce our tenth exhibition by Seattle artist, Margie Livingston. The paintings in this exhibition build on the artist’s constantly evolving way of art-making. Since we first began exhibited Livingston in 2004, the artist has created distinct bodies of work questioning “painting.” She has shown stylized oil on canvas paintings of tree branches and light, created sculpture from acrylic paint, combined landscape painting with performance in her “dragged paintings,” and, in her 2022 show, created representational acrylic paintings about self reflection. In Flux, Livingston explores the phenomena of pareidolia, the act of seeing images in random stimuli, such as clouds or shadows. “It’s a new way for me to start a painting. Leonardo da Vinci advised painters to “look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene… because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.” I poured out paint and used chance occurrences to create my own personal “indistinct things.” As I’ve worked on these paintings, I reflected on how serendipity, chance, and luck have informed these new works and how it’s hard to know where the images really come from.” –Margie Livingston Biography Margie Livingston received her MFA from the University of Washington. In 2001, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed her to study in Germany. She was the 2006 recipient of the Betty Bowen Memorial Award from the Seattle Art Museum. In 2010, Livingston received both the Neddy Artist Fellowship for Painting and the Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust, Seattle, WA. Her work is in the collections of Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Whatcom Museum, and Shenzhen Fine Art Institute, China. She lives and works in Seattle, WA. This work is supported in part by grants from 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth exhibition of photography by Los Angeles artist, Chris Engman. The artist creates labor-intensive alterations to interior settings by installing photographs to the walls, distorting our perceptions of the space. Recently the artist has introduced his son’s drawing and painting into the image. In some cases his son makes his marks directly onto the installed photographs. In other cases Engman uses the 5-year-old’s drawings as source material, altering and embellishing them as he applies them to his installations. “I study his marks, I study him while he makes them. I watch the way he holds his paintbrush and sometimes, though not always, I hold mine in the same ways. Unlike him I step back to think about what I am doing. I measure and calculate, make landscapes and rooms, compose and prepare. I consider the meanings and metaphors. When I’m ready to make marks I push those considerations to a quieter part of my mind. I try to emulate his weasel-like lack of hesitation, his fanaticism, his joy and oblivion." –Chris Engman Other works are photographs of shelving loaded with art supplies, or a crumpled sheet of photo paper in a frame. They have a trompe l'oeil effect and appear to protrude out from the wall. Biography Chris Engman received his MFA from the University of Southern California and BFA from the University of Washington. His work has been collected by the City of Seattle; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Henry Art Gallery, WA; Microsoft Collection, WA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Orange County Art Museum, CA; and Houston Fine Arts Museum, TX. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

In addition to representing artists through one-person exhibitions, we also have a 40 year history working with collectors consigning for resale unique works and editions by some of the most important contemporary artists working today. This exhibition will feature a selection of more than 25 pieces representing out most recent secondary market activity. Featuring: Guy Anderson Deborah Butterfield Kenneth Callahan Michael Dailey Sonia Delauney Jim Dine James Fitzgerald Helen Frankenthaler Richard Gilkey Joseph Goldberg Paul Horiuchi William Ivey Robert Jones Jacob Lawrence Margie Livingston Norman Lundin Sylvia Mangold Alden Mason Peter Millett Robert Motherwell Frank Okada Susan Rothenberg Roger Shimomura Kiki Smith Darren Waterston Anthony White Robert Yoder

We are pleased to announce our third one-person exhibition by Washington artist, Drie Chapek. In Inside The Outside the artist continues her deeply personal approach to oil painting. Incorporating images of both abstracted natural phenomena and human-made spaces and objects, she creates visual space to explore her inner world through imagery from the exterior world. In her lusciously painted work, thick impasto brush strokes along with thin washes of color are deployed to explore the universality of Chapek’s own personal experience. In her search for this common thread of humanity, the artist finds that though “our differences are vast, our connections and similarities are as well.”  “In my work, I am creating visual space to explore my inner world through imagery from the exterior world. I construct my painted environments with personal reminders of complexity, pain, pleasure and delight discovered within these worlds. Through the use of breath work and somatic experiencing I am able to hold the variables of life so that I can stay in my body as an active participant of my human experience. Composing collisions of energies gives me a visual field in which to explore and connect my life's joy and grief experiences.” –Drie Chapek Biography Drie Chapek graduated in 2002 with a BA in painting from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, having studied there with Roger Shimomura. The artist lives and works in Edmonds, WA.

Greg Kucera Gallery is very pleased to announce our fourteenth exhibition of work by Roger Shimomura. Titled More Little White Lies, this exhibition is a sequel to his 2021 gallery exhibition 100 Little White Lies. Again presenting a suite of 12 inch square acrylic paintings, these all made in 2022, the paintings juxtapose such disparate images as the artist’s self-portrait, Disney characters, riffs on masterpiece paintings by Lichtenstein and Warhol’s portraits of celebrities, and scenes from Camp Minidoka, where the artist and his family were imprisoned during World War II. The paintings are at times poignant, satirical, playful and full of outrage. Images of the past intermingle with the immediate present as contemporary artworks hang on the walls of internment barracks, Marilyn Monroe dons the face coverings of a pandemic response, or the silhouette of the artist as a boy renders Camp Minidoka to a canvas. BIOGRAPHY Shimomura received a B.A. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 150 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of more than 30 grants, including 4 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. Shimomura is in the permanent collections of over 100 museums nation wide including the Smithsonian Institute, DC, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. His personal papers and letters are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

Gregory Blackstock began drawing regularly in his mid-40s, cataloguing the world around him just as a botanist might classify plants in terms of families, species and genus, or an entomologist might arrange the various types of insects within his collection. The artist, who was autistic, had a prodigious memory for visual objects, musical tone and compositions, and foreign languages. As a “prodigious savant,” his need to make sense of and define an unpredictable world was given the most deeply satisfying outlet in his art. For Blackstock, the world was made up of countless things which needed to be identified, ordered, and arranged. One thing or another was seemingly of no greater weight but, once he decided to draw the chosen subject, he sought to record all of the specific variations within that group. This exhibition features a selection of drawings and prints reflecting the range of the artist’s oeuvre. Images taken from his taxonomies of the natural world (birds, animals, insects, plants, “weathers”) are seen in context with his encyclopedic view of the manmade world (clothing, cars, buildings, tools) to create the macrocosm which is Blackstock’s world. Biography Blackstock was born in Seattle in 1946. His first solo exhibition in Seattle was at Garde Rail Gallery in 2004. In 2011, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland curated a solo exhibition of Blackstock’s work and holds 15 of his works in its permanent collection. Drawings by Blackstock have been shown or are included in the collections of the several art museums around the USA, including Seattle Art Museum and Blanton Museum at University of Texas, Austin. He has been featured at several art fairs, including the Outsider Fair, New York and Paris. Blackstock was awarded 2017 Wynn Newhouse Foundation award. The Wynn Foundation grants annual awards to an artist of exceptional merit with a disability. The artist died in 2023.

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our first one-person exhibition by Portland, OR artist, Elizabeth Malaska. Licking Honey Among Thorns is exhibited in conjunction with the artist’s solo museum exhibition, All Be Your Mirror, at Seattle Art Museum through June 16, 2024. Malaska creates vignettes which respond to Western painting’s and art history’s use of the feminine form. In these works on paper, the artist presents her Feminist perspective in confrontational and theatrical tableaux. A model poses for an artist while an Afghan Hound stares out at the viewer. A horse trots through the square in Tintoretto’s DISCOVERY OF THE BODY OF SAINT MARK. In KNEELING GODDESS, a contorted female figure appears confined by the edges of the picture plane. “Painting’s histories overwhelmingly include the figure, most often the female figure as Object-to-Be-Visually-Consumed. In addition to being a way to process sensations and personal/collective experiences, I see my work with the figure as a profound opportunity to acknowledge and engage painting’s pasts while also imagining and postulating more just, complex, and dynamic futures. I center femme and female figures in my paintings, actively working to foreground and disrupt histories of objectification, making space for a more whole and liberated subject. “ –Elizabeth Malaska Biography Elizabeth Malaska earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of a Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Hallie Ford Fellowship from The Ford Family Foundation. Malaska’s work is in the permanent collection at Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, and Hallie Ford Museum. She is the 2022 recipient of The Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum, and her solo exhibition, All Be Your Mirror, is on view at SAM through June 16, 2024. She is represented by Wilding Cran (Los Angeles, CA) and Russo Lee (Portland, OR). She lives and works in Portland, OR.