Opening Reception: Thursday June 27th, 6-8pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am-6pm & selected Sundays: 12-5pm
AHA Fine Art is pleased to present City, Country, People: a diverse exhibition featuring cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes, street scenes and the characters who inhabit them. Featured artists are Queen Andrea, Vincent Arcilesi, Rasoul Akhmatov, John Breiner, Constance Culpepper, Karl Helmholz, Gwyneth Leech, Roger Nelson, Nola Romano, Clio Smith, Mel Smothers, and Natalie Steigman-Gall. On view from June 20th to July 20th, 2024 at 501 W 23rd St. (lower level of Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, NY) - this exhibition speaks to our yearning to find some balance between city and country life.
As Author Edmund White notes, “The observer is a prince who, wearing a disguise, takes pleasure everywhere”. The pleasures found in observation are key components of the work included in City, Country, People. Composed of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, collage, and mixed media works, artists on view interpret and capture the far-reaching energy, tranquility and incandescent nature of the built and natural environments from the urban to the rural. The role that we take inhabiting and exploring the environments around us serve as a central theme of the exhibition.
Painted from his rooftop on Bowery Street, aka New York City’s iconic “the Bowery” - once home to many renowned and instrumental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries - Roger Nelson’s cityscape, Sunrise combines radiant and vibrant light entering the city and highlighting the Lower East Side's geometric and cylindrical architecture. The calm of the day’s beginning juxtaposes with the rising energy of the city itself, eliciting the frenetic spirit just emerging from the streets below.
In Hit me Now Bro’s on the Slip Stream, for the Playah Smokin’ the Weed, Karl Helmhoz combines art historical periods such as Abstraction, Surrealism, Fauvism and Expressionism, with street art and handwritten text. The composition includes text that reads, “...it’s been a minute since I’ve been in New York. Tall buildings and every thang., but that’s... Surrounded by steel, expensive stores, take out, E-Bikes, ...obsessed with tech...!” Helmhoz depicts a New York City dweller cavalierly smoking, poking fun at the hipster, while referencing the heat of the pavement, New York City bustle, the chess hustlers in Washington Square Park, and the murmurs and colorful sounds of people on stoops and street corners, conjuring the grit and vibrancy of the city while evoking the syncopated rhythms and lifestyles of the village’s iconic Beat poets.
Meanwhile, using color as her vehicle to explore nature, Clio Smith blends pastels, incandescent orange and yellows with bright kelly green and muted browns in Bodega Bay, California. With a nod to Impressionism, Smith’s plein air paintings take the viewer back and forth between tranquility and anticipation. The dried and stiff weeds sway against lush grass, evoking placid and tempestuous waters and the sensory textures of aromatic salt air and the mossy cushions present within the Earth’s bucolic landscapes. The jarring effects of encountering steaming urban potholes to languishing in the mesmerizing sunsets that beam down wide and narrow city sidewalks bring the contrasts of city life into high relief. Meanwhile the hazy pale afternoons of open fields recall times spent out in the open scenes of nature. Artworks on view actively invite the viewer to embark on a journey to interpret their own personal meanings found throughout City, County and People.
For more information and visuals, please contact Francesca Arcilesi, Norma Homberg and the AHA team at info@ahafineart.com.