ARTISTS INVITE ARTISTS: 440 Gallery Invitational
January 12 - February 13, 2022 Reception: January 15, 2 - 4 PM
Thirteen artists, each recommended by a member of 440 Gallery, have been invited to show one piece of work in the main gallery space. Curated by Ellen Chuse and Karen Gibbons, this exhibition will highlight an eclectic selection of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photography and mixed-media. The thirteen artists are:
Michael Amendolara, invited by Amy Weil, is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter, visually arranging elements of color, line and shape into expressive compositions.
Peter Barnet, invited by Richard Barnet, is a painter working in New Jersey. The eldest son of the iconic American painter and printmaker Will Barnet, Barnet describes his aesthetic as formed by observing his father paint and teach. He also has a great love of classic Japanese prints, children’s art, fairy tales, and illustrations that involve dogs, wolves, coyotes and foxes.
Angelica Bergamini, invited by Ellen Chuse, is NYC-based mixed-media artist. Bergamini describes her work, “My work is a meditation on the search for balance between the inner and outer world, a reflection on what brings universality to the human experience, and the necessity for a radical reverence of life.”
Beth Galton, invited by Joy Makon, is a prominent food and still-life photographer and director, with an extensive client list consisting of major ad agencies, publications and American brands. Joy Makon, a former client, has observed Galton’s development of her personal projects that convey emotional concepts and layers of subtle beauty—in ways that Joy can relate to in her own development as an artist.
Teri Gandy-Richardson, invited by Karen Gibbons, describes herself as a creative introvert who loves to make things. Gandy-Richardson’s involvement with art and yoga—as does Karen Gibbons in her art practice—is a chance to weave and collage moments of physical gestures with experience, to encourage self-discovery and personal strength.
Simge Guclu, invited by Gail Flanery, is a printmaker and earned a BFA in 2021 from Cornell. This summer, while assisting master printmaker Kathy Caraccio, Guclu met Gail Flanery in the printshop. Gail was immediately taken by the spare elegance of Simge’s compositions and invited her to show at the gallery.
Hazel Hankin, invited by David Stock, is a photographer and proud native New Yorker. Hankin pursues personal projects that focus on her passions for Latin dancing, music and urban scenes. She also shoots assignments for foundations, publications and corporate/non-profit organizations; she has been on the faculty at City College of New York for over three decades.
Andrea Ibarra, invited by Leigh Blanchard, describes herself as a photographer, developer and space deviant. Drea’s esoteric images convey the ever-haunting notion of how small we truly are, when compared to the expanse of the universe.
Frances Jetter, invited by Susan Greenstein, makes artwork that takes the form of prints, illustrations, books and drawings. Political and social subjects have long been the focus of her work. Her commercial clients include NYTimes, Washington Post, Knopf, National Audubon Society, and her work in is the permanent collections of Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, NY Public Library, and in the Library of Congress Special Collections.
Damali Miller, invited by Jo Ann Acey, is visual artist painting and photographing in Brooklyn, New York. “My work is an abstracted exploration of subtle visual experiences, ideas and feelings both remembered and explored.”
Thomas Nau, invited by Janet Pedersen, is a Brooklyn-based photographer making images using traditional film and polaroid materials. Says Nau, “A walk in the city provides me with continual visual delight. Reflections on windows, balletic movement of pedestrians, the collage created by street ads: that is why I carry a camera whenever I’m out walking.”
Dara Oshin, invited by Robin Roi, works with a range of mediums that include painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, assemblage and mixed media. Says Oshin, “My work is inspired by Mother Nature, human nature, and the convergence of the two. I explore themes of breaking, healing, transformation, regeneration, fertility, femininity and spirituality through the use of imagery and materials.”
Jim Osman, invited by Fred Bendheim, is a contemporary American sculptor. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and a Brooklyn Arts Council grant. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as The Brooklyn Museum, The New York Public Library and The Queens Museum.
Project Space: The Language of Color
The Language of Color is a showcase featuring three unique, personal points of view around the boundaries of working with color. Bendheim, Brown and Chuse each portray emotions by using distinct palettes to reveal the dynamic language of color.
Fred Bendheim offers three new paintings that are part of his shaped compositions series where organic and geometric fields overlap and play amidst his color choices. Although these pieces are intimate in scale, Bendheim hopes to suggest worlds within worlds—spaces where shape and color combine to make translucent multiple meanings.
The abstract watercolors that Amanda Michele Brown is showing are an experiment in duality and time. Brown works to balance physical materials, chaos and happenstance as co-creators in her work, not to mention the dichotomy of feelings and memories. She uses pattern and detailing to form a structure built around loose forms, much in the same way we build personal identity and narratives to explain our lives. Watercolor, often perceived as being difficult and unruly to work with, becomes an ideal medium for Brown to explore accumulated experiences and memories. Building layer upon layer of paint, along with tedious, labor-intensive mark-making, the artist breaks down memory into components of structure and flow, the random into something more. Through these abstracted works, memory is therefore not the actual experience but becomes our own truth.
Ellen Chuse has selected a series of never-before-shown pastels from 1999 as a continuation of her long fascination with leaf and tree forms. Chuse, whose focus is on exploring organic forms found in nature, is particularly attracted to the ways in which shape and color reflect and echo one another in scale and context. These pastels are a bridge from previous drawings in charcoal to her early experiments with color—both an end and a beginning. She is excited to share this body of work as it reflects her immersion into the language of color.