Elliott Green
Elliott Green, Sing in the Sky, 2024
Oil on linen, 48 x 64 inches, 121.9 x 162.6 cm
Elliott Green
511 West 22nd Street
Over the course of four decades, Elliott Green has made paintings that transcend genres to explore relationships between the material world and abstract elements. In the last dozen years, he has given his full attention to visualizing a new kind of imagined landscape.
His second exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery continues the pursuit in this direction with a greater emphasis on the concept of flowing time, which he makes palpable in vistas of ethereal terrains and mercurial skies.
In these fictional places, free of human influence, the viewer is confronted by the sheer magnitude of nature; a primarily blue palette is tempered with spectral highlights of sepia mountain forms, flashes of hot reds, acidic greens, and hazy purples.
Green’s process involves a range of experimental painting tools, most of his own making, that stretch and demonstrate the physicality and malleability of the medium.
David Allan Peters, Untitled #11, 2024
Acrylic on panel, 60 x 60 inches, 152.4 x 152.4 cm
David Allan Peters
525 West 22nd Street
David Allan Peters’ sixth solo exhibition with the gallery presents ten paintings, including the largest work the artist has created over the course of his twenty-five year career. Rooted in process, Peters begins each work by layering acrylic-bound pigments on plywood panels in a chromatic spectrum of electric hues. After building up each panel with an inch of paint and letting it dry, he uses a lino cutter to carve into the surface, revealing the strata of colors beneath.
The finished paintings reverberate with color, texture, and movement. With a closer look at the seemingly spontaneous compositions, the viewer notices that the precise carvings follow measured patterns and grids. Stephen Wozniak, upon leaving Peters’ studio, recounts: “I think about two inescapable features that viewers readily see in his work: the cascade of color-riddled forms—rushing, relentless, free—and the gridwork that conveys a sense of stability in the face of chaos.”
Robert Russell, Falling Teacup #11, 2024
Oil on canvas, 32 x 22 inches, 81.3 x 55.9 cm
Robert Russell
Falling Teacups
515 West 22nd Street
Robert Russell has been painting teacups since 2020. Sourcing images from Google, he looks to listings on estate sales and eBay, encapsulating the deaccessioning of beloved family heirlooms in the wake of death. Prior to his latest teacup exhibition, Russell rendered his photorealist subjects as memento mori, stoically posed on dark backdrops in the style of vanitas.
Russell’s current series abandons strict photorealism for the surreal. Each painting depicts a teacup cascading down from above on unifying sky blue canvases. Capturing his subject suspended in air, the porcelain cups appear featherweight, almost angelic. Interrupting the serenity is the knowledge of the pending moment of when the delicate china meets its fate.
Growing up Jewish in America, Russell found his family outwardly concealing their identity to homogenize into societal standards. With his Falling Teacups, Andrea Bowers writes that “Russell is illustrating a deeply personal desire to shatter a generational process of assimilation… [He] has found a way to deal with painting as not only an aesthetic process but also a critical practice.”
