Gaze

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to present Gaze, a multigenerational group exhibition which explores multidisciplinary approaches to depicting forms found in or related to the natural world. Featured historical and contemporary artists include Hilary Berseth, Marsha Cottrell, TM Davy, Jeronimo Elespe, Tom Fairs, Judy Fiskin, Joe Goode, Volker Hüller, Ellsworth Kelly, Cameron Martin, Douglas Melini, Valeska Soares, Hedda Sterne and Kevin Zucker. Spanning almost 60 years (1960–2018), works on view encompass painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, and demonstrate pictorial strategies ranging from photographic to nearly abstract.

Hilary Berseth’s (b.1979, Doylestown, PA) sculptures straddle the boundary between nature and artifice.  The honeycomb sculpture, from the Programmed Hive series, was grown over the length of a spring-summer season by colonies of bees in Berseth’s specially designed hives. Over time, the bees colonized the structure created by Berseth, producing a hybrid man-made/bee-made sculpture.  

Valeska Soares (b. 1970, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) works in a sculptural mode using found objects, often re-casting their individual past identities and subverting their original use to create a new collective narrative. Horizontes III (2010) forms a horizon line comprised of 12 inlaid wooden boxes in a row, each depicting a similar view of a serene tree-lined landscape.

Judy Fiskin’s (b. Chicago, IL) gelatin silver prints have captured the American landscape and vernacular since the 1970s.  In her Desert series, Fiskin documents scenes from the Midwest in search of capturing the idea of the desert, based on her own recollections of childhood vacations in Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

Jeronimo Elespe (b. 1975, Madrid, Spain) pulls from memory and his immediate surroundings to create his meticulous paintings on aluminum. Unlike the immediacy and clarity of a moment captured by a photograph, his paintings are developed over a period of several months. Elespe’s works on view occupy a dreamlike space that is both real and fictional; in Cold Trees (2015), our view into nature is filtered through the lens of memory.

Douglas Melini (b. 1972) creates chromatically charged paintings that toggle between the representational and the abstract. Twinkling stars in Melini’s Starry Sky emerge from a collage process of layering paint in a lattice-like structure combined with gestural impasto. 

Cameron Martin’s (b. 1970, Seattle, WA) painting inhabits dual space. While Martin’s work is devoid of human presence, he approaches nature and landscape with a stillness and austerity that remains intimate, provocative and compelling. 

Hedda Sterne’s (b. Bucharest, Romania 1910, d. 2010 New York, NY) Vertical Horizontal from the 1960s invokes an expansive landscape, while simultaneously confining the viewer’s vision within a vertical format.  Sterne consistently pushes away from familiar forms, taking her work in new directions, always influenced by her surroundings and perpetually in flux. 

Marsha Cottrell’s (b. 1964, Philadelphia, PA) practice is centered around manipulation of the quotidian office computer and printer. Bridging drawing, printmaking, painting and photography, Cottrell’s process produces luminous images that allude to celestial bodies and interior landscapes. As in Untitled (9:49:46am) (2018), her works meld the sensuality of the corporeal with the enigma of the intangible.