HERE IS A SNEAK PEEK OF ELIZABETH GILFILEN’S SHOW NIGHTCRAWLER

Beth Gilfilen’s show Nightcrawler opens Friday, March 4, 2016, 7–9 p.m.
 The location is Majestic Theatre, 222 Montgomery Street
, Jersey City, NJ.

Willow Would, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 x 64 in. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

Front of the Back, 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 65.5 in. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

Backside, 2015, oil on canvas, 76 x 70 in. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

Recast, 2015, oil on canvas, 70 x 64 in. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

Beth Gilfilen at Majestic Theatre

Beth Gilfilen at Majestic Theatre

Directions from Lower Manhattan to the Majestic Theatre.

 

Directions from Brooklyn to the Majestic Theatre.

Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION present

Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler

Opening Reception: March 4, 2016, 7–9 p.m.


The Majestic Theatre Condominiums

222 Montgomery Street

Jersey City, NJ 07302

201.435.8000

Exhibition on view in the lobby from March 4, 2016 — June 30, 2016

Curated by Brendan Carroll, brendanscottcarroll.com

Nightcrawler, 2015, oil on canvas, 34 x 25 inches. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION presents “Beth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler,” curated by Brendan Carroll. This exhibition features a selection of 10 abstract paintings completed in late 2015 and early 2106. Each painting is oil on stretched canvas or linen. Gilfilen’s paintings are built through layers and layers of dynamic brushwork, the wiping away of paint, antagonistic color play, and spatial complexity. Intuition, spontaneity, and improvisation inform her work as much as formal considerations. The results invigorate.

Gilfilen’s dynamic compositions with no fixed viewpoint are animated. The paint roils and seethes across the surface in seemingly perpetual motion. Within the picture plane, intersecting lines and conflicting colors create an undeniable energy. These paintings appear as a conflagration, a dustup, and an apparition. The eye rarely has a place to rest. Within the melee, a form may emerge: an insect, bones, or a tree.

Gilfilen does not approach a blank canvas with a preconceived notion. She has an open mind and lets the painting tell her what it needs next. “I don’t really have any strategy,” she says. ‘[Painting] is very intuitive and changes the moment I begin. I don’t like formulas, and I want the painting to take whatever route it needs to take.” The subject and object of her work is the search to discover elusive forms in the act of painting. Resolution is not a forgone conclusion. Form is not always discovered. The journey, not the destination, is the key.

Although her paintings give the impression they were created during an uninterrupted burst of activity, they more often than not develop in time, in deliberate increments. Her paintings begin with drawing. Accumulated marks grow and deviate. Sometimes when she sees a recognizable form emerge, she negates it. Part of Gilfilen’s process is to sit with her paintings in order to identify what the marks and the forms might be trying to tell her. She works on several canvases at a time, each one influencing the next, in constant call and response. “I enjoy this complicated relationship to the painting that develops over time and across a body of work,” notes Gilfilen.

Line, the individual brushstroke, forms the backbone of her work. Gilfilen’s calligraphic approach leads the eye around the canvas and form the essence of her paintings. Whether thick or thin, straight, diagonal, or curved, lines have a depth, weight, character, and descriptive power.

“I love line and think it captures everything: a record of time, a description of edges, rhythm, emotion, authorship,” she notes. “I want the paintings to come out of that.”

What is thrilling about her paintings is how they straddle the line between frantic scrawl and idiosyncratic calligraphy. Is the viewer looking at childlike scrawl or purposeful arabesques, which pirouette around the picture plane in the hope of finding an elusive image or form?

Gilfilen’s gestured-based work shares stylistic affinities with the New York School, but she is her own artist with her own set of priorities. Unlike her predecessors, she is more interested in illusion and the conjuring of hidden forms from the act of painting. “I want to make those actions into things,” Gilfilen remarks. When asked what separates her work from Abstract Expressionists, she says “We are all just pulling out the threads of the fabric of what we have seen, or the paintings we identify with, and reweaving them. It is like the folk songs that are passed down and rewritten with a slightly different rhythm in the next generation.”

One of the joys experienced when looking at Gilfilen’s paintings is wrestling between two forces: On the one hand, viewers may try to identify a recognizable shape; on the other hand, they may find themselves just taking in the painting itself, surrendering to the spectacle. Gilfilen is aware of the seemingly contradictory forces in her work, and how they may undo or undermine each other. She states:

“For me, there is a huge tension between the basic immersion in making the painting and what that can come to suggest. The work grows as I work, and I have to suspend my expectations of what I think it will be. To be right at the edge of recognizing form is very invigorating, and it surprises me, but only feels true when I have been completely present with the elements of painting. When this happens, I feel I can grasp something made-up, invented, but also sort of “real” or concrete. I love the chase between what slips right into the visual consciousness as I am making the painting and [what] slips away. Every slight move or shift of the line changes the outcome, so yes, I am continuously undoing the painting in my quest to find it!”

The hidden forms in her thickets of lines reside on the tip of the tongue. Part of the fun at looking at her work is trying to match the association to its word.

Elizabeth Gilfilen is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Awards include Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, Gallery Aferro Studio Residency, Alijra Emerge Fellowship, and The Bronx Museum’s AIM Program. She was invited to make prints at Oehme Graphics in Colorado and was a Studio Immersion Project Fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York .

Recent group exhibitions include Morgan Lehman Gallery, the Blackburn 20/20 Space, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, NY, and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA. Other group exhibitions include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Islip Art Museum, and Lehman College Gallery. Solo exhibitions include Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, CT; the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her work has been published twice in New American Paintings; reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, The Boston Globe, The Newark Star-Ledger and The New York Times.

The exhibition will be on view at Majestic Theatre Condominium Association through June 30, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call number (201) 435-8000. Majestic Theatre is located at 222 Montgomery Street in Jersey City.

“Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler” is the thirtieth exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: elizabethgilfilen.com.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Robert Hendrickson, Sarah Becktle, Kati Vilim, Mark Dagley, Candy Le Sueur, Ed Fausty, Anna Mogilevsky, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to the Majestic Theatre in downtown Jersey City.

 

Sarah Becktel: Modern Menagerie

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION presents
Sarah Becktel: Modern Menagerie

Opening Reception: Friday, November 6, 2015, 7–9 p.m.

The Majestic Theatre Condominiums
222 Montgomery Street
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.435.8000

Exhibition on view in the lobby from November 6, 2015 – February 26, 2016

Sarah Becktel, Restless Tides, 2015, Oil on canvas, 18 x 30 inches. Courtesy of Sarah Becktel, sarahbecktel.com

“The word contemporary is important to my work. I’m interested in depicting the world as it is presented to me, and I experience it.” —Sarah Becktel

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION presents “Sarah Becktel: Modern Menagerie,” curated by Brendan Carroll. This exhibition will present approximately twenty works that includes oil paintings on panel and colored pencil works on paper. Her brand of contemporary realism is defined by clarity of vision, attention to detail, and technical virtuosity.

Becktel uses portraits and landscapes to transform the unusual and make it natural, from stuffed animal heads in a tavern in Wyoming to domestic goats grazing in a cemetery in gritty Jersey City. Her paintings and drawings explore how humans relate to and interact with animals in the modern world. Her work is as much about biodiversity, sustainability, and conservation, as it is about the sober observation and depiction of the world.

Animals appear as confidant, pastoral beast, and stuffed trophy. In one painting, the artist and a raccoon sit at a table to share confidences and Oreo cookies. In another, goats stand and loll atop headstones in an overgrown Harsimus cemetery under the midday sun. However, the relationship between species is not always as benign as it appears. Several works depict taxidermy animal heads eyeballing the viewer with their impenetrable, and vacant stares.

Sarah Becktel, Lost and Found III, 2015, Oil on Panel, 11 x 14 inches

The German Expressionist Franz Marc said that painting animals brought out “All that was good in me.” Becktel shares the same sentiment. “Interacting with and observing animals probably gives me the highest level of joy,” notes Becktel. Her love of animals did not seamlessly find its way into her work. At first, she used them as symbols for abstract psychological ideas. Now, animals are more the central subjects of her work.

The development of her paintings is not a fixed phenomenon. At times, an image is the impetus that drives the painting. “I could be out in the world and observe something that just sticks with me…so in that case, the imagery is the inspiration into a painting composition,” she notes. That said, Becktel does not always rely on the visual alone to inspire an image. In some instances, an abstract idea is the motivation for a given work. In these cases, she has to find “the best way to translate the concept into a tangible image.”

Becktel, who began studying with a classical realist at age ten, is proud of her academic training, but she is not beholden to it. Reference photography plays a pivotal role in the development of her paintings. “Anytime something strikes me as interesting, I snap a photo,” says Becktel. “I’m always coming across things that might end up in a painting.” The link between photograph and realized painting is not instantaneous. It may take months or years before the initial interest develops into a more concrete painting idea. During the gestation period, she often clicks through her photo libraries to see what jumps out at her.

Sarah Becktel, Wolf Tavern, 2013, Oil on Panel, 20 x 16 inches

Once a raw idea starts to become more tangible, she will do some sketches to determine the scale and composition of a piece. Sketches never become complete works. She finds spending too much time on preliminary drawings can sap the excitement and energy of her paintings. “I like to save the detail for the actual painting,” notes Becktel.

Becktel is drawn to representational painting because it puts her in control of how much information to give or withhold from the viewer. “You essentially set the scene for them,” Becktel said. What I find interesting in her work is how it manages to create immediately recognizable images without sacrificing mystery or suggestion.

Sarah Becktel is a painter who specializes in contemporary realism. She received her B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art in 2005. She continued her studies of figurative drawing and painting at Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia and the Art Students League in New York City. Jersey City Museum, Trenton City Museum, Monmouth Museum, Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts, and Salmagundi Art Club, among other institutions, have organized exhibitions featuring of her work. Becktel has received numerous honors, including PLAYA Artist Residency in Summer Lake, Oregon, and Brush Creek Arts Foundation Residency in Laramie, Wyoming. She currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and works out of her studio in Newark, NJ.

The exhibition will be on view at Majestic Theatre Condominium Association through February 26, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call number (201) 435-8000. Majestic Theatre is located at 222 Montgomery Street in Jersey City.

“Sarah Becktel: Modern Menagerie” is the twenty-eighth exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: Sarah Becktel.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Kati Vilim, Mark Dagley, Candy Le Sueur, Ed Fausty, Anna Mogilevsky, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to downtown Jersey City.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to downtown Jersey City.

Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land

SILVERMAN AND HAMILTON SQUARE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION present
Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land

Opening Reception: September 11, 2015, 7–9 p.m.

Hamilton Square
232 Pavonia Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.434.8000

Exhibition on view in the lobby from September 11, 2015 — January 2, 2016.

Candy Le Sueur, Landed, 2013, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

“Sea, sky, and land colliding are completely ingrained in my visual language. This just pours out of me. This is what I love to paint.”  – Candy Le Sueur

SILVERMAN AND THE HAMILTON SQUARE CONDOMINIUMS ASSOCIATION present “Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land,” curated by Brendan Carroll. This exhibition features nine large abstract landscape paintings that were created between 2012 and 2015. Each painting is oil on canvas. The exhibition also includes a series of small-scale prints and encaustics.

Candy Le Sueur’s evocative paintings suggest the natural world. The landscapes she depicts are rarely, if ever, still or recognizable. Light, atmosphere, and bravura paint-handling pervade. Paint alternates between viscous blasts and transparent washes, as each work seeks to strike a balance between solidity and effervescence. Part of the appeal of Le Sueur’s paintings is the threat that one of these forces may undo or overpower the other.

Although Le Sueur’s paintings give the impression of having been executed with great speed, in actuality, Le Sueur constructs her paintings over time, in a deliberate fashion. “I start with a wash of a solid color—usually a pale gray-blue—and let this dry for a day or more depending on the season. Then I apply a further layer of lighter and darker tones, which gives me some structure,” she explains. “Next, I build up the surface using a wet-to-wet technique, addressing one area of the canvas at a time. . . . This way of painting allows me to blend the color and soften where one area meets another. I push the paint around a lot.

Le Sueur paints as soon as she gets going in the morning, usually around 8:30 a.m. “I find my energy is best at that time,” says the artist. She paints for roughly six hours and then takes a break to eat and read. She returns to her studio in the early evening to paint from 4 to 6:30 p.m. She prefers silence to music when she paints. That said, if she needs some creative sparks, she listens to Van Morrison or Rodríguez, a folk musician from Detroit who was famous in South Africa.

When Le Sueur began her career, she concentrated her attention on the landscape of her native South Africa, but soon afterward, the images she constructed could not be identified by a specific region. One of the joys of viewing Le Sueur’s works is the myriad places they evoke: a windswept crag at the end of the world, a jagged coastline deluged by rain, a sunbaked plain enveloped by azure skies. Today, Le Sueur paints her landscapes from her studio in Jersey City. “I don’t need to be in the physical locale to paint my work,” says the artist. “My paintings are landscapes as I imagine them, relying on memory, intuition, and emotion.” Although Le Sueur’s style may recall, at first glance, the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, what emerges on repeat viewings is the artist’s strong affinity to Romanticism, the early-nineteenth-century artistic movement that turned to nature and the sublime as its primary sources of inspiration. Objectivity is eschewed in favor of poetic interpretation. Indeed, Le Sueur does not so much portray landscapes as she conjures them in the act of painting.

Le Sueur is an internationally recognized artist that has exhibited her work in South Africa, Switzerland, Germany, and United States. National Academy Museum, Jersey City Museum, and Drawing Rooms, among other venues, have exhibited her paintings, prints, and encaustics. Her work is included in several private collections both home and abroad. She received her Fine Arts Degree from University of Johannesburg in South Africa. She continued her studies at National Academy School in New York City. She was born in Kroonstad, South Africa, a small town in the center of the country, about 120 miles south of Johannesburg. She lives and works in Jersey City.

The exhibition will be on view at Hamilton Square Condominium Association from September 11, 2015 through January 2, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call 201-435-8000.

“Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land” is the twenty-seventh exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: candylesueur.com.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Kirk Bray, Anna Mogilevsky, Edward Fausty, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to downtown Jersey City.