Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce New Work, Five Painters. This exhibition presents abstract and representational works by a select group of artists, most of whom have previously collaborated with the gallery. All the works exhibit a vocabulary of highly personal imagery, raising issues of subjectivity, process, form, space, and gesture.

Working within abstraction and by any means necessary, Patrick Brennan constructs his works gradually as the canvas becomes a support for a wide range of eclectic mediums including Mylar, plastic, wood, silk, spray paint, photographs, cardboard, and varnish. Brennan employs these "kitsch-craft" common materials with a seemingly casual approach disguising the sophistication of carefully rendered decisions and achieving a harmony that is striking and original.

Allison Evans explores a space where figuration dissolves into abstraction. Stains, drips, and impasto brushwork coalesce and fragment, to simultaneously build and destroy form as representational fragments emerge from gestural brushstrokes. Evans’ paintings attempt to contextualize fears and anxieties that are beyond the rational. Awkward, anxious, and foreboding, her images arise from an active engagement with painting, reframing, and refiguring.

Jenifer Kobylarz creates geometric abstractions through configurations of color and process with subtlety and lyricism. These vivid yet elusive, idiosyncratic works are composed with a scrupulous attention to surface, which provides these works an overall integrity of vision that is both mysterious and seductive. Manipulating space and form, the elements in her compositions collide within accumulating layers of op-like complexity.

The varied themes in Mike Olin’s paintings endeavor to create new archetypes of signification and interpretation. The formal construction and the layering of symbols and signs range from spidery forms to video game consoles, all which exist in a cave-like imaginary setting. Olin’s elements form a lexicon that seeps into our collective unconscious.

Ian White Williams’s works are developed through an unfolding of responses. His process is one of action and reaction with the resulting meditations conveying the hum of the peripheral, the mundane and the under-considered, as he aims to capture the sensation of the intimate. The paintings are generated with a lightness and quickness of touch in a minimal process where the faintest influence or mark can tip the balance.