Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Color Play, opening June 20, 2021 at Artisan Lofts, 143 Reade Street in TriBeCa. Color Play is a group-exhibition featuring abstract works by five contemporary female artists who explore bold color and a sense of playfulness in their work. These women flex their audacious palettes, using it to unapologetically carve through and define the spatial surround. Whether earnest and pleasure-seeking, or intentionally counter-intuitive and destabilizing, these punched-up shades ferry the viewer around the pictorial plane, daring them to find their way through the high-contrast terrain.

The exhibition will be on view by appointment only.

Artists

BARBARA KEMP COWLIN

Barbara Kemp Cowlin uses acrylics to achieve the precarious facets of her architectural abstractions. Contradictions proliferate her spaces, disorienting the viewer, and challenging their perception of long-habituated surroundings. Barbara’s work is represented nationally in museum and corporate collections. She lives and works in Oracle, Arizona.

SUSAN KAPROV

Susan Kaprov’s multi-disciplinary practice integrates photography, painting, drawing, video animation, hand-colored pigment prints, and fired enamel on glass. Her series Chasing Paper is inspired by the organic and seemingly random movement of paper scraps folded and transformed into architectural improbabilities by the wind. Kaprov’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, MoMA NY, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  She has received public art commissions from NASA, Washington, D.C. and the City College of New York.  

MELANIE PARKE

Pastoral and bucolic still life settings emerge from Melanie Parke's own life. The artist reconstructs familiar interiors and filters them through the ideology of memory. Her subjects often feature flowers, which bind the artist to friendships and the women in her life. Parke utilizes sentiment to craft a domestic locus and seek visual lushness by alternating tonal moods and vivid ornamentation. Parke has had numerous solo-exhibitions across the United States, and has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, and Post Road Magazine.

MEL PREST

Color and line are imbued with taste and aroma in Mel Prest’s linear abstractions. Her recent works experiment with interference, fluorescents, metallics, and mica, subtly altering the light conditions and the flavor palette of her panels. Kinetic and capricious, Prest’s paintings jostle the eye, causing it to flit from glimmer to glimmer. Prest’s work is in the collection of museum and corporate collections nationwide. Mel Prest lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

JOY TAYLOR

Joy Taylor’s paintings transform botany into a personal vision. The sparkling detail, the alluring formal composition and the luminous colors suggest nature dreaming of itself. The paintings defy traditional still life, which seeks to tame and order the objects of the world. In Joy’s work, life is never still. It is exuberant, irrepressible, at times disconcerting and even dangerous in its boldness. Her sought-after work has been commissioned by the MTA Arts for Transit Program for multiple public transit stations. Joy Taylor lives and works in Red Hook, New York.

For viewings, more information, high resolution images, or sales inquiries, please contact Elizabeth Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com, or 917-796-2146.