Kraushaar Galleries

These Chess Paintings are process paintings: each work is a record of a specific game played between two of the world’s top Grandmasters. The painting develops the way a chess games develops – one move at a time. Each painting begins with all the chess pieces painted in the starting arrangement. When the board is set, it’s white to move. In response to each move of the actual chess game, pieces are painted out and repainted in the new square they occupy. Over the course of a single game many moves are made. Chess pieces are traveling back and forth across the board, jumping to squares, side-stepping threats, advancing ahead one square at time. In response, the same pieces are painted and repainted repeatedly, thus burying and revealing a series of events. Only black and white paint is used. As sections and squares of the board become more active than others, a range of value is created. Through this process various structures and patterns emerge. Pressures and tension build and release. The finality of each game is a moment of silence that reveals remnants of uncaptured pieces and the differing fates of two opposing Kings. Much like a fingerprint, each painting is a unique event and becomes indexical to a historical moment when two of the world’s greatest chess players battled for victory within the space of a square and within the rules of game.

We are delighted to present our first exhibition by Marissa Alperin: Interlaced, a selection of woven paintings. Alperin’s works are imaginative, rich with color and varied with texture. Some move with the rhythms of landscape, some have the balance of a still life while others have collage-like qualities. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology with an eponymous jewelry line, Alperin has recently taken her passion for creativity and flare for color to her textile designs. She handcrafts her own looms. Her vibrant hued yarns are either locally sourced, heirlooms from her mother or gifts from friends. Alperin creates her own, unique weaves. “Weaving allows me precious space to clear my head, remove everyday stresses and enjoy the moment – and most importantly smile at what I create.” Complementing the weavings will be beaded jewelry, unique designs that fuse the artist’s woven work with her jewelry design.

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." Henry James” Perhaps it is the view to the ocean from John Marin's Porch in Cape Split, Maine, captured by William Kienbusch, or the view of her back yard from Catherine Drabkin's Pittsburgh porch, or admiring William Glackens' lively bouquet of gladioli, freshly picked from the garden, or envisioning the shade provided by freshly washed laundry on a New York roof top for John Sloan's mother and son, the summer afternoon is, indeed, a lovely time.

A selection of paintings and works on paper from 1908 to 1932.

A selection of paintings and works on paper.

Floral images by four contemporary women artists.

A selection of mid-20the Century American art

a group of paintings and works on paper by 20th Century American artists, in which the colors of nature burst forth. The varied palette of landscape is captured in a sunset on Monhegan Island by Robert Henri, the summer sunlight on the rocks and vegetation at Dogtown on Cape Ann, Massachusetts by both John Sloan and William Kienbusch, and the bold strength of fruit and flowers in still lifes by William Glackens, Alice Neel, Priscilla Roberts, Joseph Stella among others.

Beginning with Dorothy Dehner’s 1933 watercolor, Bolton Landing Highway, using a nearly abstract visual vocabulary, Dehner captures the empty road and almost barren landscape near the upstate New York farm she shared with David Smith. Judith Rothschild’s Untitled, circa 1945, mixed media on paper, pushes abstraction even further as her works from this period are “a lesson in the vitality of late Cubism to bring abstract and representational pictorial space together in recombinant rhythms. (Westfall, Stephen, Judith Rothschild: Paintings of the 1940s, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 2008). Complete abstraction is found in Charmion Von Wiegand’s vibrant Telescopic Forms, 1945 and in Anne Ryan’s subtly textured oval collage, 1948-54. Catherine Drabkin’s saturated gouache, Window on the Northside 5, 2019, challenges our perspective and sense of space, “places and objects are signifiers for the passage of time, for the presence or absence of one beloved; they are used to create visual compositions as equivalents for a longing that can't be quenched.” The most recent work is Marissa Alperin’s weaving, a fusion of strong color and multiple textures. Alperin will have her first solo exhibition at Kraushaar Galleries in April 2020.

“A Chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.” These words by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe form a theme for Kraushaar Galleries’ first spring exhibition. We will present a selection of paintings and works on paper which include a chair as a primary or supporting element. During the first decades of the 20th century studio scenes frequently included a chair as a subject in a room, like Gifford Beal’s formal portrait of Harrison Cady’s Studio, or as a support for a subject, as in John Sloan’s Kathleen Resting or William Glackens’ The Breakfast Porch. As Modernist theories influenced American art, the chair took on architectural qualities as apparent in the two portraits of Bea Ault, a painting by Marguerite Zorach and a drawing by George Ault. Ruth Asawa and Elmer Bischoff straddle a line between painterly representation and elements of abstraction while Jack Tworkov pushes the chair to complete abstraction. The exhibition can be viewed from the antique copies of Chippendale chairs that have been a part of the Galleries exhibition space for about 100 years.

Kraushaar Galleries is pleased to present Interior Truth, a selection of small-scale paintings by Catherine Drabkin. In these intimate interiors, Drabkin continues her exploration of the nuances of everyday life and the “mystery of reality,” using color and light as a means of meditation or reflection. Moments, brief and seemingly insignificant, transcend the mundane, “[a] glass bottle absentmindedly left on a kitchen shelf become[s] memorable to me through a combination of color sensations, a luminous quality, or the echo of a human presence. The exhibition title comes from Drabkin’s own comments about her work, “this search is for the elusive moments of recognition when a place or shape of light brings from below consciousness a feeling or interior truth, creating connections from shapes and forms to turn the ordinary into a glimpse into the extraordinary.”

A SELECTION OF PORTRAITS AND SELF PORTRAITS ON PAPER