January 12 – February 8, 2023
COLOR: Go with The Flow: Fukuko Harris, Susan Tunick, and Ellen Weider
Assembly Required: Karin Bruckner and Wendy Moss
On the Wall: Mitchell Lewis
Opening Reception: January 12, 2023, 6 - 8pm
Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: COLOR: Go with The Flow in the East Gallery featuring Fukuko Harris, Susan Tunick, and Ellen Weider; Assembly Required in the West Gallery featuring Karin Bruckner and Wendy Moss; and On the Wall featuring Mitchell Lewis. The exhibitions run from January 12 – February 8, 2023, at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The reception will be on Thursday, January 12 from 6 - 8pm; masks are mandatory. The gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Exhibition List
Fukuko Harris
Fukuko Harris presents mixed media sculpture in COLOR: Go with The Flow. These small-scale sculptures are created using found objects, clay, plaster, paper, wire, fabric, yarn, wood, various recyclables and more. Combining seemingly disparate materials she cuts, paints, and modifies until the desired combination of color, shape, texture, and dimensionality comes to life. Harris elaborates, “The materials are often small, and at times I like to work on these pieces in relation to each other. I build shapes upon shapes and materials upon materials until the objects seem to attain their own identity in the sculpture.”
Susan Tunick
In COLOR: Go with The Flow, Susan Tunick presents select pieces from her series of wall mounted ceramic shields. With a strong focus on geometry and color, these playfully patterned and brilliant clay pieces utilize negative space along with layers of complimentary and striking colors. Using the technique of insetting clay elements into shaped clay slabs, Tunick describes that to her this is a variation on collage, which has always been part of her creative process. In the 1970’s Tunick worked on a series of large-scale paintings using striped and richly colored commercial awning fabric; In these works, she would paint over areas of the pre-existing motifs then cut and reconfigure them. Building on that process, when she returned to ceramics in the mid-1980s, Tunick began applying ceramic mosaic shards to wooden sculptural forms. Gradually she found it necessary to expand the color range of the shards, which led her to creating her own to be incorporated into the clay surfaces. These pieces have been influenced by several sources but perhaps the most dominant one has been architecture. As the President of the Friends of Terra Cotta, Tunick has examined, photographed, researched, and written about clay in architecture for over 35 years. Many of the exceptional buildings she has studied have helped to foster her love of geometry.
Ellen Weider
In her first exhibition with Carter Burden Gallery Ellen Weider presents geometric abstract paintings in COLOR: Go with The Flow. The shapes in Weider’s work float in a mysterious, ambiguous space. Some suggest houses, buildings, rooms, and other architectural structures. There are no inhabitants, but the structures themselves can evoke human presence and human interactions and can also be seen as metaphors for internal states of being. Other works employ organic or geometric forms that create a similar effect. Weider elaborates, “The ethereal settings of my images and the coalition of colors within evoke a sense of positive energy and hopefulness. My paintings explore issues of isolation and connection; whether they are interpreted as pure abstractions or as self-contained narratives, an ironic humor with a meditative, existential, transcendental bent informs them.”
Mitchell Lewis
Mitchell Lewis presents two large scale paintings entitled The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but The Truth, Part I and Part II, in an installation for On the Wall that runs from January 12 to April 19, 2023. These two works are an exploration into Lewis’ current series of ‘Squiggle’ paintings, in which his focus shifts to highlight a sequence of indecipherable hieroglyphs, shaped from brief undulating lines scrawled across the eight-to-ten-foot canvases. In both paintings the linear forms playfully roll, tumble, shift, and spiral across a black background; the largest of the two works painted in stark monochrome and the next piece incorporating energetic color.
Assembly Required
Karin Bruckner and Wendy Moss
In Assembly Required artists Karin Bruckner and Wendy Moss present a collection of collagraphs alongside of printing plates. A printmaking process using materials adhered to a rigid surface then inked and printed onto paper, collaraphs are described by the artists as a kind of “printed collage”. This method of printmaking creates a rich surface with varying textures, patterns, and shapes dependent on the materials used to create the plate. Collagraph plates large and small have been a focus in Moss's overall oeuvre and Bruckner enjoys the playfulness of working with the technique. Both women love to employ the discarded, overlooked, and cast aside as supportive actors in their plays, such as paper coffee cups in Moss's work and disassembled boxes of all kinds in Bruckner's. Once these seemingly pedestrian materials go through the hands of these artists, get inked, and printed like any other printmaking plate and sent through the press, they transform. The plate itself becomes art after being inked and subjected to the press numerous times. The artists chose for that reason to display the plates alongside the prints to illuminate the process but also to illustrate the beauty of the plate as a piece of wall sculpture. The lifespan of a collagraph plate is however much shorter lived due to the nature of the material, so only a very limited number of prints can be produced.
Wendy Moss and Karin Bruckner have a longstanding relationship as fellow printmakers working with one another In Bruckner's Printmaking Workshop at Carter Burden's Leonard Covello Center in East Harlem, as well as in Bruckner's private studio on the Upper West Side. Many of the works in the exhibition were printed using Bruckner’s studio etching press, as well as some of Moss’ work being printed at Covello and Manhattan Graphics.
Karin Bruckner
Karin Bruckner was born in Switzerland and received her education in Switzerland, Germany and the United States. She holds a Master of Architecture degree from the Technical University in Munich and a Master of Science in Architecture and Building Design from Columbia University in New York, where she has lived since 1988. After working as an architect for Richard Meier & Partners and Philip Johnson Architects in New York she returned to her passion for art. Her work has sold worldwide and is in private collections in Europe, South America, Australia and the United States. Bruckner is a represented artist at Susan Eley Fine Art Gallery, NY and has been featured by West Elm as well as online venues such as Art Crasher, Fresh Rag, Refinery 29, the UGallery blog, the Printsy blog on Etsy, and 1stdibs through Susan Eley Fine Art.
Wendy Moss
Wendy Moss was born on Long Island, NY and has spent her adult life in New York City. She attended the State University College at Potsdam, NY, where she was an Art Studio Major with a minor in Psychology. She received an MA degree from Pratt Institute in Art Therapy. After years working as an Art Therapist, she took classes at Parsons School of Design in textile design and worked as a colorist in the field. Later, she studied at the 92nd Street Y in New York City taking classes in collage/mixed media, painting, in addition to several intensive workshops in color theory, papermaking and transfers. She has also studied monoprinting, dry point with carborundum, silk aquatints, solar printing, and collagraphs, at the following printmaking studios: the ASCC (Art School of Columbia County), Inky Editions in Hudson, NY., and in New York City, the MGC (Manhattan Graphic Center, Inc.), EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio and CBCC (the Carter Burden Covello Center), where she also did a residency. She has studied with teacher Karin Bruckner, and master Printers, Beth Thielen, Lisa Mackie and Kathy Caraccio.
Installation Views
