Robischon Gallery is pleased to present four, concurrent solo exhibitions; Allison Gildersleeve “Within Earshot,” Tom Judd “Manifest Destiny,” Trine Bumiller “Stand” and Jack Balas “Yes/No (The Woods). Hailing from New York, Pennsylvania and Colorado respectively, each artist commands their individual exploration of nature-based themes through a shared expressionistic mark both distinctive and divergent.

Allison Gildersleeve "Within Earshot"

In her first Robischon Gallery exhibition, New York artist Allison Gildersleeve’s “Within Earshot” offers an energetic entry into realms which engage in a dialogue of landscape painting and abstraction. Elemental forms identifiable as tree, rock, water or sky are made highly complex as Gildersleeve’s wildly ranging brush employs deep viridian greens, cobalt blues and umbers against charged cadmium oranges and yellows. At its core, the artist’s work speaks to the possibilities of paint to re-engage the eye from the familiar into the unknown. In the largest painting entitled Tangle, for example, the thicket of neutral colored branches are trapped in a seemingly ceaseless mark-making of unpredictable color and elusive spatial definition. Each brush stroke is applied with purpose and improvisation; simultaneously building and obstructing the field of view.

Artcritical writer Stephen Maine states, “While Gildersleeve’s touch is animated and her colors sumptuous, her compositions are abruptly cropped, hedged in by the edges of the canvas as if the viewer is wearing blinders. There is no suggestion of awe-inspiring, expansive space – “sublime” in the Romantic sense. But quite the opposite: a sort of tunnel vision that eliminates the periphery and induces a disquieting absence of context. Gildersleeve’s manifest self-consciousness about her relationship to the modalities of landscape painting provides a welcome bit of friction to her enjoyable blend of chromatic audacity and tactile finesse.”

Gildersleeve positions herself and the viewer, often within a neighborhood’s natural environment - where the wooded acreage between houses, for example, offers a kind of psychological screen. In place, Gildersleeve’s brush is pulled by the presence and sensation of light, her imagination and the magnetism of abstraction. While nature’s complexities provide endless fascination and the spark for the artist’s work, it is the act of painting itself which ultimately becomes her timeless subject.

Allison Gildersleeve is originally from New England and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MA from Bard College Milton Avery School of Art, New York, where she studied under artist Amy Sillman and a BFA from William and Mary College, in Virginia. Gildersleeve has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and the Elaine De Kooning Memorial Fellowship. She has held residencies which include Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Millay Colony for the Arts in New York and the Vermont Studio School and exhibited at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. Gildersleeve continues to be widely collected and exhibited across the US and internationally.

Trine Bumiller "Stand"

In Trine Bumiller’s tenth solo exhibition at Robischon Gallery, the Colorado artist’s highly-recognizable mark shifts into focus for her latest series entitled “Stand.” Known for many years for her complex, shaped, multi-part works, Bumiller returns to her roots of the singular painting arena. The series maintains the artist’s signature luminous paint with its heightened color and contrast, yet directs each composition exclusively toward a poetic stance and the tree as subject. The artist’s writes, “Painted over time, with many subsequent layers of transparent oil glazes, the tree forms become imbedded in the paint like insects in amber. The flow of paint relates to their organic nature. Revealing and concealing layers point to the history of their making and to associations of time and place.”

Bumiller communicates through nature and abstraction in equal measure. Her forms are clearly recognizable, yet it’s the unexpected paint that marries radiant uncommon greens with fire brushed yellows or dusk-like blues, which offer to alter the viewer’s usual perceptions. As well, the human-scale of the work allows for the possibility to enter from a unique position of the personal or psychological. Bumiller states, “These paintings continue my interest in nature as an abstraction of memory and human consciousness. Trees represent the reality of our experience in their existence, stature, and longevity, yet embody the passage of time in their transformation through the change of seasons and in years of growth. Their very structure, with upright trunks, roots anchored in earth, and branches reaching to sky, recalls the human experience on earth in transcendence from the physical. They represent our memories, our experience and our dreams.”

A BFA graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, Trine Bumiller has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Collins, Redline Gallery and numerous other museums . Her work is included in collections such as the City and County of Denver, Colorado Convention Center, University of Colorado, The Children’s Hospital of Denver, Japanese Consulate General, University of Iowa and many corporate and private collections. Bumiller has received fellowships and awards including a Denali National Park Artist in Residence award, Colorado Council on the Arts award and residencies to the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Tom Judd “Manifest Destiny”

In his second Robischon Gallery solo exhibition, Philadelphia artist Tom Judd combines his collagist sensibility with an expressionistic mark to tell tales of the landscape in “Manifest Destiny”. Balancing a love of paint and process with a desire to carry a message of the fragility and mystery of life, Judd’s visual poems are intimate and intuitive. The large scale canvases of distant valleys, mountains and vast lakes – are primarily approached with a nearly forgotten palette of greyed browns and black to convey their all but muted worlds. Judd writes, “Although these paintings are done in a limited palette, I don't think of them as dark, but only slightly melancholy and even romantic. Most of the images come from 19th century photographs of the west from the likes of Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan. I have always been moved by these pictures. They occur much like the pictures of Mars from the lonely Mars-rover. They capture a raw, dangerously beautiful world, unforgiving and pointless. Before freeways and shopping malls, there was this pristine, breathtaking view.”

Judd ignites the memory of such terrain with an occasional insistence of color in the landscape in the form of pale green or yellow or an unpredictable patch of coral. The handling of the paint becomes its own discovery; thinly or thickly applied, dripped or layered in some instances, so as to pin an actual patterned cloth surrounding a painted vista. Each element of color, drawn mark, or found material is positioned to reveal a little more of the story – one from the past that can never be fully known, but perhaps understood in abstraction. In Judd’s hands, the history of place can be better told with a brush stroke – a tree is never depicted, rather, the attitude with which it was painted stands for something. As well, the presence of the airplane in the exhibition begins and ends the tale – as it is a clear symbol of quest and discovery. The artist states, “I think these paintings are like hymns for a mysterious American landscape that we have steadfastly conquered. We have embedded ourselves – helping ourselves to the bounty of the land.”

Layered, scraped, brushed or found, each technique employed by Tom Judd to create is not unlike an archeologist at a dig. For the artist, it is always about the pure intent to discover and the process of questioning that pursuit at every turn - which for the viewer is what makes each mark made, so absorbing.

Tom Judd studied painting at the University of Utah and the Philadelphia College of Art. He was a Pollack Krasner recipient and received fellowships to the respected Millay Colony for the Arts and highly regarded Macdowell Colony. His work is regularly exhibited in numerous galleries across the US and is in the collections of Philadelphia Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts including many corporate and private collections.

Jack Balas "Yes/No (the Woods)"

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its tenth solo exhibition by Colorado artist Jack Balas. Known for his fluidly masterful painting technique, wry humor, text and the youthful figures that often inhabit his works, Balas’ current exhibition incorporates symbolic aspects of Nature. Landscape imagery or fragments of natural form are presented as an intimate kind of puzzle by the artist, with his characteristic free-handed and expressionist gestural mark. His use of the figure – deemed “the everyman” by the artist – incorporated with mountain-scape, forest, or deer – are expressed with a collagist approach and reach beyond the individual elements to imply a narrative. The artist states, “I think of landscape painting as map or diary; an arena linking the visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation all the while engaged with the viewer to build bridges between disparate ideas.” What appears to be randomly positioned in Balas’ work such as text or numbers, provide a formal structure along with witty or provocative insights into his conceptual approach and all are furthered by the artist’s beautiful handling of paint.

Balas’ playful yet complex approach is evident with the exhibition work, which is central to the show, entitled Yes/No (The Woods). The mixed media painting features a central square of bare, well-grained plywood that figuratively serves as a sturdy tree trunk. A painted branch intended to look like plywood sprouts to the right over the word “NO” which stands at the edge of a loosely painted woods. Likewise, the word “YES” completes the left side of the triptych as it mirrors the same hazily-lit forest. As is usual for the artist, offering wordplay to the viewer prompts a process of deciphering and is intended to evolve in a myriad of ways. All of Balas’ work is purposefully and generously subjective – each element a puzzle piece made compelling and mysterious. The painting Long Been Suspected gives view to a contained, yet rugged mountain range revealed through a lifted tent flap on unprimed canvas. And on it the text states, “THAT WHICH HAD LONG BEEN SUSPECTED, But has since been ascertained” gives pause to consider what universe Balas has revealed – or if in the end, it is both the artist and the viewer who tell a tale that holds countless endings.

Jack Balas holds a BFA and an MFA from Northern Illinois University. His work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Museum of the Southwest and Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, among others. His work is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Albuquerque Museum of Art & History, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky and numerous private and private collections along with being an National Endowment for the Arts painting fellow.