Crush Curatorial and ZieherSmith present a two-person show pairing Bill Komoski and Lauren Silva, New York-based artists whose singular tactics of abstraction are not limited by traditional oil on canvas but instead are formed with paper, paint and textile on silk, un-stretched drop cloth and sprawling wall drawings. Bill Komoski has been praised since the late 1980’s for “not pursuing novelty at the expense of painterly exploration” but offering a visual experience “akin to watching a system go from order to chaos and back.” Singled out by Howard Halle as an artist “every art fan should know (Timeout NY December 2015), Komoski has steadfastly adhered to an abstract language consisting of skeins, meshes, veils and grids, simultaneously obfuscating and enhancing a central image, here a shadowy human form.

Yet what often appears as parti-colored digital interference are multi-dimensional build-ups of media including paint, fabric, collage, all in the service of an ever-present grid, what the artist has called “the most ordered and uniform way of dividing up space, but subjecting it to a degree of decay, erosion and layering… which undermine its inherent stability.” Born and bred in New York, Bill Komoski’s exhibitions include solo shows at Barbara Gladstone, New York, Angstrom, Los Angeles, and Feature Inc., New York and inclusion in museum shows including at The Parrish Art Museum and the Tang Teaching Museum. His work can be found in several public collections including the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, the MCA San Diego and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN. The immediacy of Lauren Silva new hand-painted work provides a fresh contrast with her critically acclaimed, process-heavy approach of digital manipulations and elaborate printing techniques seen over the past two years. Retaining her uncanny sense of texture, depth and complicated layering, the new paintings are integrated wholly by pigment, brush, appliqués of paper on her signature substrate of silk. This free new approach is evident in both retinal and conceptual senses.

Compositionally, somewhat more recognizable imagery has begun emerging from her penchant for abstraction, a fluid and graceful approach to the natural world where organic forms mingle and morph with their surrounding atmosphere. Born in the Bay Area in 1987, Lauren Silva received her BFA from UCLA and her MFA from Columbia University, where she received the Tobey Devan Lewis award. In 2011, she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has recently been exhibited at The Hole, New York, Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia and ZieherSmith, New York. Her paintings have been widely reviewed including in The New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, among many others.