dm contemporary

dm contemporary NYC is thrilled to present 'The Summer Show' - a group exhibition featuring recent small and medium size works of twenty three gallery artists as well as invited artists, and showcasing the range of styles, approaches, and media that the gallery supports and incorporates within the focus of its program. While 'The Summer Show' is always a challenge to physically, visually, and conceptually put together - since it is not theme or concept driven, nor is it a body of work created by one artist - it is always fun, inspiring, and an opportunity to expand the gallery's vision and horizons.

David Aipperspach's often large scale paintings straddle the sensibilities of painterly abstraction and pop with their vibrant color palette. Yet, compositionally they achieve a simplicity and elegance reserved for works of minimalism. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design's MFA program in Painting, he is a current artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass, CO). Aipperspach has exhibited his work at many venues of note, including Nancy Margolis Gallery (NYC), The New York Design Center (NYC), 808 Gallery at Boston University (Boston, MA), Palos Verdes Art Center (Los Angeles, CA), and Centro Estatal de las Artes y Culturas (Mexicali, Mexico). He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

Steven Baris was born in Aberdeen, Washington and grew up on various Indian reservations in Northern California, Montana, and Washington State. Drawing on his childhood experience, his paintings offer a unique perspective on the rapidly expanding, highly engineered, 'new landscape' - exurbia, its architecture, and its network of connecting highways. He received a B.A. from The Evergreen State College and an M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art. His work has been exhibited in many nationally-recognized galleries and cultural institutions [Margaret Thatcher Projects (NYC), The Drawing Center (NYC), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, to name a few]. Baris is the recipient of many grants - most recently, in 2013, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting. He lives and teaches art in the Philadelphia area.

Jackie Battenfield is an artist living and working in New York City. Fascinated by the most abstract qualities of landscape, her luminous paintings and prints evoke resplendent, ephemeral aspects of nature that mirror inner emotional landscapes. Battenfield received her BA from Pennsylvania State University, and her MFA from Syracuse University. Her work has been exhibited extensively in galleries, universities and museums. In 1991, she was the recipient of a painting award from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and in 1996, she received The Warren-Tanner Memorial Fund Award in painting. Her work is in numerous private, public, and corporate collections worldwide including: Cablevision, Long Island, NY; Fidelity Investments, MA; Jinling Tower, China; Sasaki Collection, Japan; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; Palmer Museum of Art, PA; The New York Public Library, NY; The USA Department of State, Washington, DC, as well as USA Embassy Collections in Peru, Brazil, and Croatia.

Richard Bottwin is an artist living and working in New York City. His abstract, geometric, and architecturally or object inspired wall sculptures have been exhibited widely in solo exhibitions at OK Harris Gallery (NYC), Metaphor Contemporary Art (Brooklyn, NY), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia PA), and Bernadette Salvage Fine Art (Brooklyn NY), as well as in group exhibitions at Neuer Kunstverein (Aschaffenburg, DE), Key Projects (Long Island City, NY), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit NJ), Galleri Tom Christoffersen (Copenhagen DK), among many others. His work is included in the public collections of The Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) and Bayerische Landesbank (NYC).

Linda Cummings' recent works reflect a versatility in the artist's approach to the photographic medium, and a merging of the practice with mark making, and drawing. Born in Valley Forge, PA, she has a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and an MFA from Mason Gross College of Art at Rutgers University, NJ. Cummings lives and works in New York City, and Branford, CT., and currently teaches at the International Center of Photography in NY. Her photographs have been featured in fine art publications such as BLIND SPOT magazine, "Graver La Lumiere" Exhibition Catalogue, and the "Director's Cut" of APERTURE. Widely exhibited nationally and internationally, her work is in private as well as public collections, such as: the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC), Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY), Lehigh University (PA), Muskarell Museum (VA), NYU Langone (NY), New York Health and Hospitals Corporation (NY), Sumitomo Corporation of America, NY, Museo Nazionale della Fotographia de Brescia (Italy), and Musee Jenisch (Switzerland).

Rob de Oude's paintings and drawings are composed of meticulously placed lines that are repeated, layered, and woven, to reveal geometric shapes and patterns, and produce web-like grids. The overlapping grids of color, and the collision of angled lines create an elusive sense of space - shifting the colors, and deceptively bending the lines. De Oude's studio is in Brooklyn, NY, and he is co-director of Transmitter, also in Brooklyn, NY. He has shown in the US and abroad, notably at Galerie Gourvennec Ogor (Marseille, France), Storefront Bushwick, McKenzie Fine Art, BRIC Rotunda, and City Ice Arts (Kansas City, MO). De Oude has been featured in the NY Post, L Magazine, Artnet Magazine, NYArts Magazine, The New Criterion, ARTNews and has been noted by Brooklyn Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in Brooklyn culture.

Carole Freysz Gutierrez's bright, extravagant colors continue to dominate her most recent paintings, whose forms are fantastical and stylized warps of her earlier grids. She was born and raised in Zurich, Switzerland and studied at the School of Art in Zurich. She received her graduate Fine Art degree at New York University. Before moving to New York Gutierrez lived in Frankfurt, London, and Zurich. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively at dm contemporary, and were featured in 2005 on public television in a program called 'Ticket'. Her work is in many public and private collections - including University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, and it has been reviewed by numerous publications including the New York Times. Ms. Freysz Gutierrez's work was selected by NYU Langone Medical Center's art program, and recently, the site specific seventy-five foot mural - a result of the artist's collaboration with a master printer - was installed at the center's new pediatric emergency department. She currently lives and works in Oyster Bay, NY.

David Headley's abstractions emanate color, vibrating with playful energy as they draw us into a world of floating forms. Born in Washington, PA, Headley has a BA in Literature from Washington & Jefferson College, and he served with the US Army in Vietnam from 1968-1970. Since 1979, he has lived and worked in New York City. Headley has exhibited his work widely, including at Post Gallery (Houston, TX), Kristen Frederickson Contemporary Art (NYC), Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (NYC), Brenda Kroos Gallery (Cleveland, OH), Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ), and the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). In 2012, the University of Arizona Museum of Art exhibited several triptychs from Headley's ongoing project to produce one hundred and twenty giant triptychs.

According to Ron Johnson, there is an archaeology to seeing, particularly when one experiences the topography of the western states and the Rocky Mountain region. Taking trips every year to the area, he started painting and working with the idea of a puzzle – a practice he has coined "puzzlization" - how things are put or fall together. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Ron Johnson received an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a resident at the Ucross Foundation Residency in Cleamont, Wyoming in 2004 and at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France in 2002. His most recent exhibitions include: SCOPE Miami and Art Aspen (Duane Reed Gallery, St. Louis), Reynolds Gallery (Columbus, OH), Gary Snyder Gallery (NYC), and Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA).

Zoe Keramea's versatility with paper allows her to playfully explore possibilities - printing, folding, creating modules, breaking down the modules, and stacking them, she creates three dimensional sculptures that are fragile and bold simultaneously. Keramea lives and works in Athens, Greece and New York City. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, Kouros Gallery, Dietzspace, Tenri Cultural Institute, and The Drawing Center in New York City. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1989 to work on her printmaking project "Two Stage Intaglio Matrix Prints - Zoetypes" in New York.

Sun K. Kwak is primarily known for her 'space drawings' that are spontaneous expressions of space created with gaffer tape as a response to specific architectural site. Kwak uses the same colorful gaffer tape to create vibrantly colored 'sculptural drawings' that hang or are free-standing sculptural objects. Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Kwak lives and works in New York City. and has had solo exhibitions at New Art Gallery (Walsall, UK), Gallery Skape (Seoul, South Korea), Causey Contemporary Fine Art (NY), The Brooklyn Museum (NY), The Queens Museum at Bulova Center (NY), among others. She was a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Grant in both 2006 and 2011. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and many other publications.

Originally from Alexandria, Virginia, Matthew Langley paints large color fields with a richly textured surface. The paintings are borne of divergent strategies: one of building up, the other of minimizing. The result is a deft mix of brilliant and subtle coloration in relatively large, clearly delineated areas. His works on paper follow the same strategies with a slightly more playful touch. Langley studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and received a BFA from The Corcoran School of Art. His work has been exhibited extensively in venues, such as Axom Gallery (Rochester, NY), Susan Calloway Fine Art (Washington DC), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Pocket Utopia (Brooklyn), The Delaplaine Arts Center (Frederick, Maryland), and Blank Space (New York City). He has been featured and his work reviewed in publications such as Art in America, The Washington Post, and The Washington Citypaper, among others. He lives and works in New York City.

Born in New York, Vincent Marksohn is an artist, designer, poet and musician currently living and working in Burlington, Vermont. His recent camera-less photographs focus on color and painterly qualities achieved by scanning the movement of colorful objects - mimicking brushstrokes with neither paint nor brush. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont where he studied art and writing, and was Co-Editor in Chief of The Cause Arts Quarterly. His work has appeared in Cocktails at the Apocalypse (Ra Press) and Vantage Point, and his photographic work has been exhibited at dm contemporary (NYC) and The Colburn Gallery (Vermont).

Joanne Mattera works in a manner she calls "lush minimalism." Her small, luminous color fields, composed of layers of translucent wax paint, allow hue to develop by accretion as much from the inside out as from the outside in. She divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts. She has exhibited her work widely at Kenise Barnes Fine Art (Larchmont, NY), Conrad Wilde Gallery (Tucson), Arden Gallery (Boston), Structural Madness (NYC), and Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta). In addition to guest curating A Few Conversations About Color, a group exhibition at dm contemporary earlier this year, Mattera has added her curatorial eye to exhibitions at Rice Polak Gallery (Provincetown), Paul Scott Library, Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA), the Visual Art Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), and R & F Gallery (Kingston, NY), to name a few. She maintains the Joanne Mattera Art Blog, in which she reports on exhibitions in New York City and elsewhere.

Youjin Moon's abstract digitized films begin with a series of photograms, or as acts of mark-making and painting directly onto the surface of film. The resulting imagery is a woven abstract sequence, organic in nature, rhythmic in motion – it transports the viewer on journeys between microcosms and macrocosms in appropriate dramatic silence. Moon was born in Busan, Korea. She is a visual artist working across video, short 16mm film, painting, and installation. She received MFAs in Painting and in Film/Video from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and holds a BFA in Oriental Painting from Hong-Ik University in Seoul. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally in galleries and film festivals including EXiS at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the Brattle Theatre in Boston. She currently lives and works in Boston.

Martin Mullin's mixed media paintings are infused with the rhythm and energy of the city around him - the city being New York. The introduction of goldleaf in his recent series, the Golden Books, adds a rich layer to the paintings that changes mood with the changes in light and atmospheric conditions. Living and working in New York City, Mullin is originally from Ireland. He has exhibited at One Mile Gallery (Kingston, NY), Brenda Kroos Gallery, (Cleveland, OH), Louis Newman Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Rachel Stella Gallery (Paris), Russell Gallery (New York, Belfast) and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (NYC). His work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Life Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Sun, The Art Newspaper, New York Daily News, and many other publications, and it is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The United States Library of Congress, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, Biblioteque Nationale Paris, and many others.

Tomomi Ono's exquisite execution and careful detail have earned her the reputation of master printmaker, and though she remains faithful to the traditional technique of stone lithography, she continually pushes its boundaries to fully express her ideas about the nature of existence. She was born in Osaka, Japan, where she studied traditional Japanese painting. After spending some time in Spain, she arrived in New York in 1993, where she studied lithography at The Art Students League. She currently lives and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, NY. Ono's work has been exhibited in the US, East Asia and Europe. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and her work is in prestigious private collections, as well as in major public collections, such as The New York Public Library.

Born in Italy, Nadia Pignatone & Fausto Pellegrini are a New York-based artist and designer team, who are partners in business and in life. Their sumptuous ceramic forms, and luxuriously smooth, and vibrantly colored porcelains, have been exhibited internationally, and are in private collections in Italy, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.A. Their work has appeared in many international publications, such as Abitare, Elle Decor, Maison Francaise, Marie Claire and World of Interiors. While some of the ceramic works exhibited here were a result of their collaboration, other works were created by Pignatone, who studied ceramics at The School of Ceramic Art in Deruta, Perugia, Italy, as well as art, and graphic design in Como and Udine, Italy, and at the School of Visual Arts, and Arts Student League , NY. Besides her successful career as a ceramicist, Nadia Pignatone has worked as a graphic designer with Milton Glaser, collaborated with prestigious design studios in Italy and New York, and co-owned a graphic design studio in NYC with Fausto Pellegrini for two decades. They currently reside in Huntington, NY.

Willy Bo Richardson transfers experiences and emotions into paintings where color dominates. Vertical bands of color flow and pulsate in unusual yet harmonious color relationships. Richardson received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute, and he is currently a faculty member at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. In 2012, he exhibited at Phillips de Pury in Chelsea. In 2011 his work was included in the exhibition at Jason McCoy Gallery in New York titled, "70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpts". The show assembled works by a selection of modern and contemporary painters, including Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock. His work and vision were featured on the KNME-TV PBS weekly arts series ¡COLORES!.

Karen Schiff refers to her drawings as extremely 'realistic', since her lines 'represent' the paper itself, even though they yield a totally abstract image. Tracing lines, revealing grids, articulating spaces, and exposing any inherent 'defects' - her marks depend on what the surface of a given paper suggests. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at dm contemporary, Danese Gallery, Jason Rulnick Gallery, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland), and many others, and it has been reviewed in many publications, such as Art Papers, Art New England, the Boston Globe, Kunstforum International, and artscope. Schiff is also an art writer, whose writings have been published in numerous art publications, including Art in America, and Art Journal. She lives and works in New York City.

Katsumi Suzuki's monoprint silkscreens are deceivingly simple, yet the rich colors within his perfectly circular forms attain volume and a silky luminosity through a masterful manipulation of his stain technique. Born in Japan, Suzuki is an artist and master printer currently living and working in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions at Fine Art Gallery, Southampton College (New York) and Ai Gallery (Tokyo, Japan), and he was included in group exhibitions at Gallery 128 (NYC), Air Gallery (NYC), American Contemporary Graphics Museum of Contemporary Art (Montevideo, Uruguay), Kanagawa Prefectural Hall Gallery (Yokohama, Japan), and many other venues of note.

Originally from Lodi, California, Derrick Velasquez currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado. His most recent wall sculptures employ stacked hand-cut strips of marine vinyl, acrylic and hardwoods to create organic forms whose unique visual tension comes from the effect of gravity upon the works themselves. He received his BA in Studio Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MFA in Sculpture from Ohio State University. Velasquez is a founding member and co-manager at TANK Studios and Adjunct Professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. His work has been exhibited nationwide, including solo shows at Volta Art Fair in New York City, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO) and Robischon Gallery (Denver, CO), and in group shows at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art (Santa Fe, NM), the Arvada Center for the Arts (Arvad, Colorado), Alter Space (San Francisco, CA), and Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA).