Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Interplay, a group exhibition featuring new and recent paintings by five contemporary female artists: Justine Hill, Zahra Nazari, Nora Maité Nieves, Anna Pietrzak, and Mia Weiner. On viewfrom November 30 to January 6, the exhibition features selections of their paintings, which showcase a breadth of different mediums and styles of expression. An openingreception will take place on November 30 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the second floor of 521 West 26th Street.
The artists in this exhibition take up different processes and mediums—such as handwoven cotton, 24k gold leaf, acrylic on mylar, sculptural painting, and modeling paste—to create works that luxuriate in their materiality. Though experimenting with various styles that range from abstraction to figuration, as well as architectural abstraction that shuttles somewhere in between those two poles, the artists featured in the exhibition are united by their palpable sense of delight in the very process of artmaking. As such, these works are marked by an inexhaustible wonder in form, and its infinite affordances and limitations.
Justine Hill’s exuberant sculptural painting-constructions imagine the possibilities of shapes that the traditional canvas can permutate into, incorporating “cut-out” negative spaces of the canvas as a vital part of the work. The works of Zahra Nazari, abstracted from architectural references, conjure striking visions of places untethered from specificities. Incorporating a wide variety of mediums, Nora Maité Nieves blows up architectural details to create enchanting abstractions that are reminiscent of the primordial forms found in the transcendental artworks of Agnes Pelton or Raymond Jonson. Anna Pietrzak enlists gold leaf in her works to glorious effects: her works simultaneously evoke private, otherworldly visions and the present grace of the here-and-now. Mia Weiner’s woven offerings depicting intimate scenes acquire an eerie beauty and a haunting sensibility, probing what it means to memorialize relationships and care through color, material, and form.
“We are thrilled to bring together the work of these five extraordinary, talented artists,” remarked Paul Efstathiou, Director of Contemporary at Hollis Taggart. “Their works will offer a glimpse into how a divergent, unexpected group of works can lean into their differences to produce a surprising and thoughtful dialogue, the works ricocheting off one another and anchored together by their unifying commitment to the process of artmaking.”
Justine Hill (b. 1985) experiments with the boundaries of abstract painting through a unique approach to form and mark making. Hill paints on shaped wood panels referred to as “cutouts,” a process she began in 2015 while questioning the constraints and neutrality of a single rectangle. Hill’s non-rectangular paintings collage many disparate themes ranging from science fiction and cyborgs, to the 1970s art movement Pattern and Decoration.
The work of Zahra Nazari (b. 1985) is based on architectural references mined from her memories of her homeland of Iran and her life as an immigrant in New York. Her experiences of visiting archaeological sites throughout Iran continue to inspire and inform her work, while her migration to the United States has introduced a formal blending of Persian and Western architectural styles, specifically the modernist movement of European futurism.
Interdisciplinary artist Nora Maité Nieves (b. 1980) creates richly textured and tactile surfaces that often incorporate a variety of media, including acrylic, silver-leaf, flashe, and fiber paste. They are abstracted visual motifs of architectural details culled from both Puerto Rico and New York. Straddling both of these worlds, Nieves explores themes of identity and belonging, as well as histories of places that “we knowingly or unknowingly carry with us throughout our lives.”
Working with gold leaf and acrylic on wood panel and canvas, Anna Pietrzak (b. 1987) creates compositions inspired by gestures of the human body and nature in which forms balance against each other, held in striking tension. While Pietrzak’s forms are minimal, their arrangements and shimmering surfaces are monumental and emotive, evoking the history of the sublime. Gold leaf is used not as embellishment, but as the primary medium of the work. It carries tension as a paradox of something that was once unbearably heavy, now made impossibly light.
Mia Weiner (b. 1991) creates intimate declarations that explore identity, gender, and the psychology of human relationships. For her, cloth is simultaneously a bandage and a cover, but most of all, a place of shared experience. Labor-intensive and time consuming, Mia’s woven pieces are sites wherein the senses coalesce; object becomes image, touch becomes vision. Utilizing the human figure as her artistic language, Mia begins her pieces by choreographing bodies in space. After photographing them, she digitally alters the images until they are ready to be transferred to a grid and then manually woven.
