Massey Lyuben Gallery is pleased to present New Old, a group exhibition featuring works by Giulia Dall’Olio, Garrett Klein, and Matthew Larson. Dall'Olio, Klein, and Larson explore the relationship, dependency, and narrative aspects of layering through subject matter and materials.
Giulia Dall’Olio, who lives and works in Bologna, Italy, paints mystical utopian landscapes rich with abstraction. Her engraved oil on panel paintings are dense with layered visual material: murky trees are disrupted by meandering carvings and beautiful washes, as if there’s a gentle rain veiling the composition. The works are polished but purposefully obscured and draw upon the classical genre of landscape painting.
Garrett Klein works primarily with acrylic paint, panel, and plexiglass to create his mixed-media paintings. Klein's physical layering of materials lends an approachable yet mysterious quality to his paintings. The interaction of each layer creates energetic movement: zig-zags and slaloms of color ground the airy plexiglass.
In Matthew Larson’s textile works, the artist uses hand-dyed yarn to create meticulous weavings. Unlike traditional warp-weft weaving, individual threads of yarn are layered, by hand, into Velcro. The artist’s powerful tapestries recall the Minimal painting style common to the Op Art movement of the 60s. Through contemporary weaving techniques, Larson brings a fresh approach to the trajectory of traditional tapestry in art history. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.