Hirschl & Adler Modern

Self-taught Art (also known as "Outsider Art") rejects convention. In that spirit, we have taken a different approach in this e-catalogue, which is presented as a dialogue instead of a list of works with short essays. Frequently asked questions about this often perplexing field are answered by Tom Parker, a Director at Hirschl & Adler and a well-respected authority and lecturer on the subject. Our hope is that this format will provide an easy-to-understand introduction to an area of the market that is often confusing and difficult to approach. Better yet, we hope that it might introduce some to an exciting field that is still in the process of gestation and discovery. History is being made, right now, by the legacy of these works, and the collectors, curators, and scholars that are moved by their visionary and emotional content. For biographical information on the artists presented here, please click through the links that are embedded in the text.

Trompe l’oeil, at its best, subverts our expectations. When pushed beyond pure verisimilitude, it forces us to shift our perspective both intellectually and physically. "Every Lie to Truth" brings together four artists whose work has this rare ability. For them, trompe l’oeil is a strategy to engage the viewer in the deeper discussions with which they are concerned. Truth, futility, loss, and fallibility are the subjects here, operating beneath the illusory surfaces so skillfully composed. Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, and Meredith James urge us to question what it is that we are looking at and why. In doing so, we accept every lie in order to arrive at the truth behind it. Please use the provided link to view the exhibition's e-catalog. You may also visit the gallery's website to see installation images and to learn more about the artists.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present Self-Taught Artists at the Crossroads of Fact and Fiction, an exhibition featuring works by a distinguished group of self-taught artists, including Bill Traylor, James Castle, Willard Watson (The Texas Kid), Purvis Young, Lonnie Holley, Jeanne Brousseau, and James Edward Deeds. This compelling show offers a unique exploration of the intersection between reality and imagination, where the distinctions between truth and fiction blur, creating deeply personal and thought-provoking narratives. The exhibition showcases the diverse visions and creative expressions of artists who, without formal training, developed innovative approaches to artmaking, often infused with personal histories, memories, and cultural storytelling. Their works span a range of media, from drawing and painting to sculpture, and represent a wide spectrum of emotional intensity, from the raw energy of Bill Traylor’s vivid imagery to the meditative abstraction of Lonnie Holley’s intricate, hand-crafted sculptures. A key highlight of the exhibition is the debut of contemporary artist George Widener with Hirschl & Adler Modern. Widener, known for his meticulous works that merge mathematical precision with artistic expression, introduces new pieces that challenge conventional thinking and expand the boundaries of visual culture. Self-Taught Artists at the Crossroads of Fact and Fiction brings together works that explore the fluidity of truth and imagination, celebrating the unique ways in which these artists craft their own realities through art. Their ability to create outside the confines of formal education has led to a rich body of work that challenges accepted definitions of art and artists. Each piece in the exhibition offers a fresh, intimate view of the world, blending fact, myth, and fantasy into a captivating visual dialogue.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is delighted to announce an exhibition of early works by American Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline (1910–1962). The installation will feature more than 20 paintings and works on paper from 1940 to 1950, before Kline débuted his large-scale black-and-white canvases in his first solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery, New York, in 1950.

Winold Reiss (1886-1953), who scholars increasingly recognize as a pivotal figure in early 20th-century American art, is known for his evocative portraits that capture the spirit and character of his subjects with unparalleled intensity and daring visual approach. The exhibition will cover the full panoply of subjects explored by the artist, including portraits of influential figures from the Harlem Renaissance movement, Mexican revolutionaries, American indigenous cultures, as well as artists, fashion models and other cultural icons in New York in the 1920s and 30s. All will reveal Reiss’s unique combination of innovative artistic design and uncanny psychological depth.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "From the narrow place," James Everett Stanley’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Collapsing time, space, and personhood through gestural representation and fractured picture planes, these nine new paintings stand as non-linear stories of people’s lives. Along with the depictions of his friends and neighbors on Cape Cod, the artist gives equal importance to the landscape of the area, which he sees as continually changing and constantly under threat. A sense of precarity pervades each picture, wherein each person needs to stay attuned to nature’s sudden shifts.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present this exhibition of Amy Weiskopf’s most recent paintings, her third solo show with the gallery. Across these works, the artist’s fusion of traditional representation and modernist strategies highlights her command of the still life as both form and content. Keenly observed and deftly painted, each object in Weiskopf’s work is essential and the relationships between the objects are complex – full of tension, ambiguity and intimacy. The flattened backgrounds, made of shadowy blocks of color, provide just enough space for drama to play out. Earnest and unassuming, Amy Weiskopf’s still life paintings radiate with a power that belies their scale.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is thrilled to present "The swamps are pink with June," Julie Heffernan’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Across fifteen new paintings, the artist’s female protagonists, stand-ins for the viewer and the artist herself, inhabit lush gardens and resplendent trees. Nestled beside blooms of rich color are scenes and depictions from western art history. The Fall of Adam & Eve, Hudson River School landscapes, and portraits of Queen Victoria blossom from expansive branches. In others, dense shrubs grow from under the central figure’s skirt, rooting her to the landscape that surrounds her. Climate activism, feminism, identity and lineage are the major themes of Heffernan’s career and here they entangle in fresh and welcoming ways.

Hirschl & Adler Modern is thrilled to open its Fall 2022 season with "Maritime," Randall Exon’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first since 2013. Twelve new paintings of quotidien moments are imbued with the artist’s celebrated sense of haunting beauty. Each one feeling all the more poignant against the backdrop of recent events. Focusing on the sea, and boats more specifically, this body of work was born out of Exon’s experiences during Covid lockdown. Needing to simply “get out of the house,” the artist began exploring the back roads of Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey, across the state line from his home outside Philadelphia. It was there that Exon found a working-class yacht club that had fallen on hard times, with dozens of old yachts out of the water, propped up on poles and jacks. Initially drawn-in by the architecture of the boats with their colorful keels fading in the sun, Exon was captivated by the timelessness of the scene. The artist would return again and again to paint what he found there, keenly understanding the allegory he was depicting. Through Exon’s masterful handling, the sense of isolation and of being outside of time, shared by many during the pandemic, is channeled into moments of wonder and peace.

In her metaphorical poem from 1959, "Mushrooms," Sylvia Plath extolls the humble origins and unnoticed advances of mushrooms as they overtake the forest floor through the sheer power of their communal will. This politically motivated poem resonates deeply with artist Lily Cox-Richard, whose multifaceted practice explores commodification, material agency, reuse and activism, particularly through the framework of natural elements and processes. For the artist, the vast extension of mushroom colonies acts as a metaphor for the complex networks affecting all aspects of contemporary society and culture. By titling her exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern, "Soft Fists Insist," after a line from Plath’s poem, Cox-Richard signals her intent. The artworks seen here reveal and conflate systems found in both nature and society in order to force a reset of those systems which marginalize and impede growth. This exhibition, the artist’s second with H&A Modern, is timed to coincide with the artist’s current solo show at MASS MoCA, "Weep Holes" (through January, 2023).

Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "A Likeness," a group exhibition featuring seven contemporary artists who push the boundaries of portrait painting. Often dismissed as anachronistic, portraiture plays a vital and dynamic role in each of these artists’ practice. For them, it is a strategy rather than a genre and one which elevates their work beyond a simple likeness of the sitter. While each work in the show can be solidly defined as a portrait, these paintings are also deep meditations on more abstract concepts such as labor, commodification, marginalization, grief, and displacement. These artists understand that a portrait captures the life and time of the subject, but it also encapsulates those of the artist. Understood as such, what is at once a depiction of an individual is also a broader picture of a culture and of a society. The artists find themselves echoed in the likeness of their subject and the viewer will do so, as well.

A solo presentation of the self-taught artist James Castle of Idaho featuring examples from his major bodies of work: paper constructions, drawings, and hand-made books. Born profoundly deaf, Castle did not speak, read or write in any conventional way. Cut off from many sensory experiences and from most social interaction, the artist pursued a deeply personal examination of the rich visual world that extended no further than the back fence of his family’s small farm.

Much more than “lead into gold,” alchemy is the pursuit of new understanding and new ideas through the manipulation of what already exists. This pursuit resonates strongly in "Our Secret Fire," a group exhibition dedicated to nine artists whose work purposefully exists between states of being, caught in the act of metamorphosis. These artists utilize the shiftiness of the liminal state to explore ideas like domesticity, production and commodification, perception, and phenomenology.

Looking at a painting by Colin Hunt is like watching someone pass through a hole in our consciousness. As the landscape refracts through the sitter’s absence and fills that emptiness, the world remakes itself in the image of what has been lost. For the artist, these human-shaped portals operate between here and the hereafter, providing sublime solace in the shared human experience of grief. In "So Much Remains to Be," his debut solo exhibition with Hirschl & Adler Modern, Hunt collapses the concepts of sitter and likeness, space and time by connecting the formal traditions of portraiture and American landscape painting. The resulting panels explore a collective intuition enveloping memory, humanity and the afterlife. These themes may be heavy, but Hunt’s paintings are tender and optimistic. The people we love and lose are always with us, absorbed and refreshed in the spaces we inhabit. As the exhibition title suggests, there is so much about here and the hereafter still to be realized.

Is it discomfort, or excitement, that you feel when you watch these women languidly roust, or subtly drift asleep? Do you happily play the voyeur, seduced by their beauty and the opulence of their surroundings? Do you feel that nagging tug from your mind that you are being watched, as well? Angela Fraleigh has spent her career exploring narrative art’s hierarchical patterns. Keenly observing how images and roles from Western art history intersect with contemporary representation and attitudes, Fraleigh uncovers why certain tropes remain relevant, who they benefit, and how. Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "Fluttering still," the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. In these ten new paintings, Fraleigh depicts women in liminal states between wakefulness and sleep to perfectly encapsulate today’s social and political dynamics. The women in "Fluttering still" are not here to satisfy any outdated notion of their role nor the viewer’s predatory desire. Fraleigh has awoken them within a new context, wherein their agency exists for their own, and each other’s, sake. In rearranging the images of the past, the artist changes how we see ourselves in the present. Fraleigh, deftly and subtly, empowers her subjects through a variety of strategies. Removing the original art historical context from these figures removes any “traditional” value-based judgments of femininity. In the void, Fraleigh injects additional conceptual layers. In "Shaking to sound the silent skies" and "A pang of livid light," the swirling, abstract patterning surrounding the figures comes from the fin de siècle illustrations rendered by Gerda Wegener and Ethel Reed, two female design pioneers who upended the social norms of their era. Their graphics offer Fraleigh’s figures a haven as well as a lineage. Another key element to Fraleigh’s paintings is her depiction of women together. The “sleeping woman” trope has always been about power, existing to satisfy the voyeuristic viewer. Fraleigh subverts this motif by rendering one woman noticing the other either through her gaze or through contact. This interaction closes a loop wherein there is no room for the viewer. These women are here for each other, and as a result they hold the power. Even routine formal decisions benefit the artist’s concept. While the paintings included in "Fluttering still" range from the intimate (24 x 18 inches) to the grand (90 x 66 inches), Fraleigh’s figures are always life-sized or larger. Treated this way, no woman is diminished.

As we celebrate 20 years representing Elizabeth Turk, Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present an exciting new project, "Tipping Point– Echoes of Extinction," the latest body of work by the internationally-recognized sculptor. While furthering her exploration into the overlap of art and nature, Turk confronts a globally important issue: Extinction. "Tipping Point" employs sculpture, sound, and technology to ask: what role can humans play in the preservation of a species, including our own? Are we at a tipping point?

Trompe l’oeil, at its best, subverts our expectations. When pushed beyond pure verisimilitude, it forces us to shift our perspective both intellectually and physically. "Every Lie to Truth" brings together four artists whose work has this rare ability. For them, trompe l’oeil is a strategy to engage the viewer in the deeper discussions with which they are concerned. Truth, futility, loss, and fallibility are the subjects here, operating beneath the illusory surfaces so skillfully composed. Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, and Meredith James urge us to question what it is that we are looking at and why. In doing so, we accept every lie in order to arrive at the truth behind it.

From the Upper West Side to SOHO and out to Coney Island, Frederick Brosen paints the honest and over-looked splendor of New York City’s rainy street corners and gritty façades. Fourteen watercolor paintings, ranging in scale from 10 x 9 inches to 45 x 32 inches, celebrate the city which has served as the artist’s career-long muse and lifelong home. These paintings offer quiet moments of reflection amidst the bustle of NYC, and their skilled-handling demonstrates that Brosen is a true master of watercolor.