Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Spring Revival an exhibition of new works by Daniel Brice, Christian Haub, Rory MacArthur, Marilla Palmer, Stacey Piwinski, Rocío Rodriguez, Yolanda Sánchez, Debra Smith, and Josette Urso.

Daniel Brice practices his explorations of color and light within a minimalist framework. Brice’s paintings are subtle, their simplicity betrays the intense attention to detail that is paid to each brushstroke. The paintings appear monochromatic, however a small band of rich color often anchors the composition. Brice lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and has exhibited extensively throughout the United States.

Christian Haub began work on his “Floats,” which operate in the “intersection between painting and sculpture” in 1990. He was awarded the Rome Prize for painting in 1984. Haub lives and works in New York, NY, his work has been included in several important public and private collections.

Rory MacArthur creates elaborate, large-scale, sculpture-like constructs out of Styrofoam. The work is meticulously carved and assembled into fantastic trompe l’oeil agglomerations of geometric forms and neon pigments. MacArthur was born inPerthshire, Scotland and in 2004 was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Marilla Palmer works from life in media that are both traditional and nontraditional. Noticeably absent from her newest work Sweet Pea and the Blue Persimmon Tree is the tree’s fruit, which she has replaced with sequins, dried flowers and spore prints. Palmer explains that “[the] patterning on the tree riffs off the patterning of the bark in blue: the least natural color for a tree. If the Persimmon tree could choose what to wear it would be the colors of the sky and water.”

Stacey Piwinski is simultaneously a painter and textile artist. Fabric and paint conduct a dialogue with one another while sharing the same space. These works are a synthesis of the history of woven fabrics and abstract painting, which when paired result in these hybrid creations that she has termed “Objects of Labor”.

Rocío Rodriguez creates “fragmented realities” through her exploitations of light and dark pigments, and geometric and representational forms. The works are complicated and densely populated by stacks, pillars, pedestals, totems, stains, hard edges, loops, scribbles, and erasures in an attempt to engender color as palpable space.

Yolanda Sanchéz’s work is, first and foremost, an abstract exercise in color. Expressive brush strokes fill pure white fields with ribbons of highly saturated pigments. Forms are only loosely drawn from nature but may occasionally rise from their surroundings in the shape of a rose or a lily. Sánchez lives and works in Miami, FL.

Debra Smith uses vintage textiles as a medium to bring a history, a weight, and a poetry to her work from the moment of conception through to the work’s completion via cutting, sewing, and piecing together of disparate parts. Ultimately, by “[allowing] the work to intuitively flow thru (sic) [her, does she] feel the end result is similar to a drawing or poetry.”

Josette Urso’s practice is intuitive, nearly involuntary. She paints to capture movement and moments that may otherwise be lost to the passage of time. By painting thickly impastoed works on canvas or panel Urso creates profoundly expressive works that articulate the space between light and dark, winter and summer, rain and shine. She lives and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, NY.