SEXTET
TransVagrant and Warschaw Gallery are pleased to present Sextet, a group exhibition of paintings by Katy Crowe, William Mahan, Yong Sin, Gary Szymanski, Marie Thibeault, and Ted Twine.
Katy Crowe is an abstract painter of lyrical, reductivist leaning whose gentle meditations on natural and geometric shapes and structures belie a stubborn, complex and informed aesthetic. Offbeat, unanticipated shifts in drawing and pattern often yield a near kinetic appearance, while works appearing driven by chance or game strategy – often pastel, light and airy – utilize microtonal shifts in color and form to subvert the decorative in favor of the articulate.
Veteran Los Angeles artist William Mahan is known for large-scale works based on real-life places and events and painted with a directness that often belies their sophisticated drawing, color, and facture. Conceptual rigor, physical insistence, and eschewing “pure” abstraction in favor of the “impure” image, are hallmarks of Mahan’s long, remarkable career.
In Yong Sin’s work the simple becomes unexpectedly elaborate; the ordinary metamorphose into distinctiveness. The goal is to create work that is inherently distinctive and belies its repetitiveness. The ordered linear grid format is often a composition to experiment with group structure and the dynamics of configurations. There is persistent interplay within each grid that amplifies within a group setting.
Gary Szymanski breaks the silence of his geometric pursuits by presenting selected text pieces, which have been a parallel concern of the artist all along. Seldom exhibited, the text works are simultaneously engaged and detached, referencing the controversy surrounding inflammatory political rhetoric, its media exploitation and reception. Dispassionately rendered in black and white, these austere works function as thoughts made material – words alone, autonomous and devoid of authorship.
In Marie Thibeault’s paintings landscape functions as a metaphor both literally and symbolically. She states, “The genre of landscape is a potent archetype, both for American painting, and for our national psyche. Landscape represents our exterior “state” both literally and figuratively, and can mirror our culture’s complex relationship with nature, as well as contain and unfold the expanse of one’s imagination. I attempt to address the sublime by combining and expanding upon the traditions of American landscape painting, within a hybrid structure. The images in the paintings are invented from many fragmented photographic moments, which I collect from news imagery and historical documentation.”
Ted Twine’s work engages the viewer in a tug-of-war between abstract and figure painting. Utilizing a near-cartoon imagery that flirts with representation, and rendered with frankness that veils its sophistication, Twine’s paintings reference modernist tropes with intelligence and wit. Playful to menacing shapes appear animated against colorful fields in an informed engagement of the visceral and cerebral.
