Fair Haven, 2016
ALBERTZ BENDA, NEW YORK | BOOTH NP1
LUCIA LOVE | ALI SILVERSTEIN
LUCIA LOVE (B. 1988) draws inspiration from sources ranging from Trenton Doyle Hancock, Victor Moscoso, Mike Judge, to David Shrigley. She invents characters - America's most vital export – which is used as a channel to depict snippets of popular culture, consumerism, and systemic gender stereotypes. Originally a student of traditional animation at School of Visual Arts, New York, she sought to create a new host of iconic characters for an underground cartoon. A feminine presence in a stereotypically male genre, Love offers a fresh view by incorporating diverse elements of mass media and fine art, while relaying an uncensored and incisive account of the absurd culture at large.
In her most recent work, Love has kept her sights on narrative and atmosphere. For Zona Maco, Love presents two new paintings addressing broader themes such as helplessness and the absurdity of violence.
In Fair Haven, the scene utilizes a pattern to denote a landscape filled with bodies. In the background there is a red grid, which symbolizes a virtual reality; in this reality there has been no effort to make the illusion into a seamless reality such as our own. This is a world where a pile of snakes in the form of a man stalks around with a shoddy human mask on, looking for victims to rend into blobs. This scenario alludes to the harsh reality of daily life, where entire populations have become desensitized to aggression, and violence has become the norm.
In 2016 Love’s work was shown at NADA NY with a site-specific installation created for the Projects Section of her comic drawings, as well as a solo presentation of paintings at albertz benda. In 2014, Love participated in The Last Brucennial and in the collaborative installation/performance Soft Power: The Game Show at Spring/Break Art Fair in New York; she also had a solo show entitled Reflecting Pool at the CUE Art Foundation. She has been reviewed by Hyperallergic and Huffington Post.
ALI SILVERSTEIN (B. 1980) makes paintings that are comprised of multiple layers of canvas: by staining, drawing, painting, and stenciling, Silverstein cuts, rearranges, and pins forms without a specific reference point. Her practice is unpremeditated and improvisational resulting in a playful push-and-pull conflux of sheets.
Silverstein's constructions feel airy and contingent and lie somewhere between Richard Tuttle's Critical Edge series and Matisse's La Gerbe.
Silverstein's work combines painterly skill with the authenticity of immediate, unqualified gesture in works that are often large and sculptural. Her preference for gut feeling rather than preconception, improvisational "allowing," over planned composition, and primitive expression over slick industrial production, recall the philosophical spirit of abstract expressionism and action painting.
For our presentation at Zona Maco, Silverstein created three new paintings: two continue to explore impulse and desire which is the subject of her latest body of work, and a new painting entitled Atom bridges her rigorous training in portraiture and figure with her current process and move into pure abstraction. With all paintings she draws inspiration from the realm of domesticity to guide her gestures. The marks on the layered surfaces are improvisational yet influenced by decorative objects. The shapes and patterns in the work reference physical objects such as ceramic vases or textiles, however the abundance of colors and lines obliterates the boundaries of the figures, releasing the viewer from symbolic references. Flirting with representation only to delve back into expressive abstraction, Silverstein transcends her personal comfort zone by embracing disorder and resisting her natural sensibility towards the tangible.
Silverstein studied visual art and comparative religion at Columbia University, New York before attending The Slade in London, UK where she received her MFA in Painting. After moving her studio practice to New Mexico for several years, she now lives and works in Los Angeles. Silverstein has participated in numerous shows in London and Tel Aviv and was an artist-in-residence at the Bialik space in Tel Aviv. In 2016, she presented her work with great success with her first solo show in New York at our gallery. In 2017, Whitewall magazine will name her “artist to watch” in their march issues and she will be in a three-person exhibition at the San Diego Art Institute.