STEFFANY MARTZ is pleased to present ONWARD, a close look at three new bodies of abstract painting. Running from November 19 through March 11, 2023, at 49 East 78th St., 2nd Flr., ONWARD comprises three solo exhibitions by three long time veterans of the New York art scene, whose work has changed substantively in the pressure cooker (or freedom) of the past few years.
Sara Garden Armstrong’s oeuvre, though remarkably consistent thematically over the past 30 years, knows no formal boundaries around materials, techniques or categories. Sculpture, including building size work, paintings, artist’s books, tableaux and installations all cataloging the various processes of exchange that not only underlie both life and technology, but increasingly connect them. Her current paintings reflect, perhaps as none of her earlier work, a resolution or synthesis of these intense, often diametrically opposed impulses.
Mary Jones, is a gestural abstract painter. Jones’s work has encompassed just about every genre of mark making and its associated mental space. Recently, however, as part of a quest to make consciously “beautiful” paintings, her work seems to have come down in a new and quite real space. Interior Design, Part I, has the artist painting with Sumi ink over printed photographs of French Interior Design. These are then printed on canvas and repainted with oils. The combination produces a beautiful, deep black velvet color and texture while figurative associations address ideas of western dominance and cultural critique.
Max Estenger’s newest paintings continue to reflect his 30 year plus commitment to the formal strictures of hard-edged abstraction combined with brilliant color. Real physical space and the physical components of painting and how they relate to this space are implicit concerns. His new work maintains these categories, if only as appropriate, but shifts slightly to move the pieces from the physical world into the spiritual realms of pure color and pure spirit.
Sara Garden Armstrong’s New Work opens Saturday, February 11th with a reception for the artist from 4 – 7 pm.
Sara Garden Armstrong
received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from UAB. After living in New York City for 36 years, in 2017 she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works. A recent recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL grant (Creating a Living Legacy) Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 40 years. Her work embraces a wide range of scales and techniques from large site specific sculpture to artist’s books, all of which examine organic processes of transformation. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others. The monograph SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers published in 2020 coincides with a traveling exhibition touring the southeast US 2020-2023 incorporating site-specific art for each location.
Mary Jones
received a BFA and MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She began her career in Los Angeles and has been living and working in NYC since 1986. Jones has shown her work in galleries and museums internationally. She is represented by High Noon Gallery, her most recent show “Attachments” in 2020 was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail and White Hot Magazine. Other exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, John Molloy Gallery, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, Robert Green Fine Arts, Cugliani Gallery, Marlborough Chelsea, Ovsey Gallery, and Cenci Gallery, Rome. She is in many notable collections, including the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles. Her work has also been reviewed in the NY Times, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, and Artnews among others and is included in the book, “L.A.Rising, SoCal Artists Before 1980,” by Lyn Kienholz. Jones is a Senior Critic at RISD, where she has taught since 1998, and an instructor at SVA since 2009. As an art writer, she has also contributed to The Brooklyn Rail, artcritical.com, and bombmagazine.org.
Max Estenger
was born in Los Angeles, California and received his M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1988. He has been living and working in New York City since that time. Recent career highlights include a 2016 survey with a fully illustrated catalogue at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, curated by Jocko Weyland. Also in 2016 his work was acquired and exhibited by the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. His work also has appeared in Artforum, FlashArt, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. For the past three decades Estenger has been developing new possibilities for abstraction. Driven by the rigorous formal language of hard-edged abstraction, Estenger’s painted objects are involved in the ongoing dialogue, formal, material and ideological, surrounding abstract painting. The visual clarity of his work emphasizes its integrity and lends an almost moral dimension to the serious study of direct aesthetic experience.
Steffany Martz is an art dealer and writer living in New York City. In 2014 she received her Master of Philosophy in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has known and worked with these superb artists for more than 20 years.