Painting Deconstructed

Despite its title, the group show ‘Painting Deconstructed’ exhibits many works without paint. Currently on view at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Gowanus, the show, curated by artist and gallery cofounder Leeza Meksin, is an energetic assortment of curious works. The dozens of artists poke at the titular medium and search for new uses and meanings of the substance of paint, the practice and history of painting, and the painting as an object.

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Each work evidences a deconstruction or questioning of what we consider typical of the medium, using various materials, forms, and references. Many veer toward sculpture; for example, Polly Apfelbaum’s Robin, Dove, Swallow, Thrush (2022) is a collection of 19 ceramic bars, each with a different color of glossy glaze. Arranged in concentric rectangles, the pieces echo the shape of a frame, broken up and placed on the wall instead of a picture. Two fantastical glazed creatures appear in Emily Tatro’s A nymph could fall in love (2024), a textural ceramic work occupying the familiar space of a painting, mounted directly onto the wall.

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Untitled (2023) by Jen P. Harris is one of several works in which the artist has altered the typical canvas of a painting. Four sewn-together canvas squares are stretched over a small frame, two abstractly painted, and two decorated with intricately woven cotton. This patchwork emphasizes the fabric's seams, threads, and textures over any figure or ground. Similarly, Hannah Beerman staples sheer floral linens and a bright orange plastic shopping bag onto a partially exposed wooden frame in Untitled (pillowcases and Home Depot handles) (2023), piecing together and decontextualizing mass-produced products. The materials are not transformed but instead assert their quotidian uses: the handle of the bag hangs off the work, along with roughly cut edges, complete with an upside-down, smudged, and torn shipping label with the artist's name and address. The sheet is carefully tucked around the frame, imitating its original purpose.

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Works such as Erika Ranee’s Selfie (2024) add a communal sense of levity and spirit. The work is made of black-eyed peas affixed to a wooden panel and includes a small living air plant and bits of the artist’s hair. Far from the static paintings of history, this is made of the unconventional materials of food, parts of the artist’s body, and a discrete living organism, all of which inevitably shift.

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Further works interrogate the history of painting head-on. Valerie Hegarty’s Drinking Dreams: Grapes 1 (2023) evokes a Dutch still life of grapes spilling onto a table, though it is painted on a surface of squished-together balls of foam clay, sitting atop the canvas. Moma and Me Thighs (2022) by Gina Beavers is an irreverent self-portrait, showing the artist’s view of looking down while sitting on a toilet. The paint protrudes off the canvas, forming rounded lumps for her legs decorated with miniatures of The Starry Night and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, done with a nearby open set of paints, all with her pants around her ankles.

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More than any individual work, what is most notable is a collective sense of expansiveness and optimism. The exhibition showcases a cross-pollination of ideas among a community, underscored by the gallery’s location in the Old American Can Factory, now mostly made up of studios. The sheer scale and variety of the works included are heartening; viewing them together, the grouping demonstrates motivating and diverse experimentation and conversation. It presents a snapshot of ongoing thought processes, parts of a perhaps eternal reconsidering of an endlessly flexible art.

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Images courtesy of the gallery by Chanel Matsunami and Theodora Bocanegra Lang