Kathryn Markel Fine Arts

NEW YORK, NYSeptember 18, 2014Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Paintings and Prints, Lisa Breslows fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Lisa Breslow continues to explore her vision of New York and the places in her day-to-day life. Breslows recent cityscapes and still lifes capture the present moment, an instant which possesses a beauty all its own, conveying a sense of calmness as time stands still. Attentive to the subtle, exact instances of harmony between varying elements, the works express mood analogous to the way photographs document visual details. In her new work, Breslow expands on her tonalist sensibilities, and emboldens the compositions with a more heightened and varied color palette. These new oils reveal a looser brushwork, slightly skewed angles, and fresh perspectives with bursts of color to juxtapose instances of nature and architecture. Forms are delineated by color contrasts that add yet another layer of richness to her scenes. Breslow remains focused on paring the subject down to its visual essence, over specificity of details, as her panels grow larger and her city blocks inch ever closer towards abstraction. Using monotypes, Breslow employs the same underlying geometry used in her oil paintings to present still lifes and twilight scenes of Central Park. Monotypes allow Breslow to experiment, changing her painting process of slowly building layers to a quicker, more spontaneous way of presenting formal relationships and atmosphere. She articulates her acute awareness of the interplay of light and structure, natural and fabricated form and texture, and representation and abstraction. Lisa Breslow has exhibited extensively in the United States, has been awarded two Pollock-Krasner Foundation awards, and received an award from the National Academy Museum in New York. She is a recipient of the J. Alden Weir residency in Connecticut and the Cawdor Residency in Scotland. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, In New York Magazine, and Arts & Antiques among many others. Breslow has work in numerous collections in the US and abroad, including the Pfizer Corporation, Tiffany and Co., and General Electric.

SARA MacCULLOCH October 16 November 15, 2014 Opening Reception, Thursday, October 16th, 6:00-8:00pm NEW YORK, NYSeptember 9, 2014Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Landscapes, Sara MacCullochs third solo exhibition with the gallery. The landscape has been a source of inspiration for Sara MacCulloch since childhood, when she spent summers and weekends in rural Nova Scotia exploring fields and shorelines. As a painter, her interest lies in exploring the connection between being in a landscape and looking at a painting of a landscape. In her newest body of work, she conveys not just the physical appearance of these places, but the emotional relationship she has built with them over the years. This series was painted over the last year and is exclusively depictions of Halifax, Nova Scotia and the surrounding areas of the Minas Basin. She spends summers hiking and documenting the landscape with watercolor sketches and photographs. The rest of the year she expands these into larger oil paintings on canvas. Using broad, smooth brushstrokes, MacCulloch creates an inviting lushness out of earthy browns, cool blues, greens and greys. MacCulloch begins her process with the feeling she wants to convey and allows herself to get lost in process of revealing it. Each work in this series was painted almost entirely in one sitting in order to focus on the most important elements of place and mood. The instant a painting is over-worked or does not come together in a day, MacCulloch scrapes it away to start anew, ensuring a sense of immediacy in her finished work. The results are gestural, yet resolved compositions that give us just enough information to understand the beauty of the place and emphasize being present in a fleeting moment. They are serene, subtle and still direct and honest. Sara MacCulloch received her BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She exhibits extensively throughout Canada in Halifax, Toronto and Edmonton. Her work is in the collections of the Nova Scotia and Canada Council Art Banks, the Gotsland Kunstmuseum in Gotsland, Sweden, and various public and private collections. MacCulloch is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including four individual grants from the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture and an Established Artist Award from Creative Nova Scotia.