Jennifer Riley

The comprehensive survey exhibition of Joan Mitchell’s works on paper at Cheim and Read spans from the late 1950s to the year before she succumbed to cancer in 1992.
Joan Mitchell, “Pastel” (1991). Pastel on paper. 48” x 31 ½”. © 2007 The Estate of Joan Mitchell, used with permission. Courtesy Cheim & Read.
Keiko Narahashi’s glass cabinets, paper structures and mixed media objects occupy two historically distinct categories: seventeenth and eighteenth century curiosity cabinets and contemporary installation art. They could be provisional shrines, memorials or artifacts, all built from multi-size boxes of Italian parchment paper dipped in gesso.
Keiko Narahashi, “gravity’s rainbow” (2006). Oil, gesso, paper, wood, candles, dimensions variable. Courtesy Hudson Franklin.
Don’t let the initial charms of the quiet, reductive logic of Marietta Hoferer’s drawings fool you. This artist may be a maximalist in a minimalist guise.
Marietta Hoferer, â??Fieldâ? [detail] (1998-2006). Pencil and tape on paper. Six panels, 140"Ã? 108".
As the title of Nicola Lopez’s current exhibition Overgrowth suggests, much of her work is devoted to the negative transformation of the environment by our glorification of technology and the ever-accelerating pace of urban development.
Nicola Lopez, “Silver Lining” (2006). Intaglio on paper, image size 24"× 19.5", paper size 30"× 25.5". Edition of 10. Courtesy of the Artist and Caren Golden Fine Art.
Eric Benson’s first New York solo exhibition offers seven elegantly crafted, exquisitely designed collage paintings of an imagined contemporary American landscape. The paintings, all from 2006, depict all-too-familiar urban sprawl full of incongruously sited International Style glass skyscrapers, decaying forms that have outlived their usefulness, and ubiquitous cookie cutter housing developments on the frontier of suburbia.
Eric Benson, “Liars (Talking Skulls)” (2006). Acrylic on canvas. 80"× 70". Courtesy of Roebling Hall.
When David Smith’s burnished steel surfaces absorbed the colors and light of their surroundings they proposed an entirely new way of engaging with sculptural space. The colors of the landscape or the interior locations where these works are sited became nuanced reflections linking the objects to their environments. Zurich-based artist Reto Boller, born one year after Smith’s fatal car accident in 1965, seems to extend Smith’s achievement by inverting it.
Reto Boller, “Untitled” (2006). Courtesy of James Nicholson Gallery.
Sarah McEneaney is known for her autobiographical narratives rendered with jewel-like colors in egg tempera on wood. When an artist chooses to depict personal events as subject matter, there is a risk of being sentimental, anecdotal, or (in some cases) even boring.
Sarah McEneaney,  “RB Fisher,” (2005) Egg tempera on wood, 36 x 48 inches. Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
For over thirty years, New Mexico based artist Florence Pierce has been developing richly nuanced, low relief resin and pigment paintings. In their elements of monochrome, experimental mediums, and sense of seriality, these post-minimal, reductive works place her both in the tradition and company of Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Robert Ryman, and Robert Mangold.
Florence Pierce “Untitled #247 and #248,” 1998. 
Courtesy of Howard Scott Gallery.
Over the past three decades, Judith Linhares has practically invented the genre of imaginative figurative painting largely populated by confident young women engaged in activities ranging from the banal to the idiosyncratic, thus paving the way for artists such as Amy Cutler, Hillary Harkness, and Dana Schutz.
Judith Linhares, “Rabbit,” 2005. Courtesy Edward Thorp.

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