Hybrid Histories
June 15 - July 24, 2022
M. David & Co. is pleased to present Hybrid Histories, an exhibition of new artworks by Donald Martiny, Elisa D’Arrigo, and Barry Katz. The show will open on Wednesday, June 15th and run through Sunday, July 24th. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, June 15, from 6 to 9 pm.
Exhibition essay by Paul D’Agostino
Artists thrive on taking cues from creative precedents and taking them in novel, unexpected, perhaps critically reflective, even surprising directions. These cues sometimes come from the greater or lesser titans of art history. Other times, artists’ cues pertain more specifically to formal or material concerns. The artists in Hybrid Histories take cues from and redirect all such precedents in their individual explorations of the frequently fungible territories of sculptures and paintings, and in their variable predilections to allow color itself to catalyze the works. Donald Martiny, Elisa D’Arrigo, and Barry Katz see tradition as something to be revisited and reprised, then refashioned, sundered, and hybridized.
Donald Martiny has turned a profound and enduring investigation into some of art’s oldest modes of communication and expression into a longstanding practice of channeling and truncating tradition. Mark-making, brushstrokes, and palette choices are crucial to his works in ways that make this claim anything but axiomatic, for these essential elements come into aesthetic confluence as his figurative subject and gesture of abstraction. Indeed, these elements furnish the objective entirety of Martiny’s wall-bound sculptural paintings and painterly sculptures: they present as enormous, dynamic, robustly painterly gestures dripped along and gooped upon walls, and they bristle with striated nuances of color that simultaneously magnify, sculpturally, the optical effects of chromatic striations. Vehiculating Pop and Abstract Expressionist sensibilities, as well as a researcher’s interest in the visual tricks and quirks of painting’s classical masters, Martiny aims to make a uniquely resonant, highly personal mark in mark-making. As such, his works have become recognizably remarkable as generously revelatory, manually indulgent sculptural forms that instantiate, amplify, encapsulate, and extol a most essential painting act – and that appear barely stable, at best, and that obscure nothing while embedding much. In this latter sense, they’re like a dramatic moment of emotional complexity betrayed by the flutter of an eyelid, by a swiftly fleeting glance.
Elisa D’Arrigo makes ceramic objects that seem to be harvested from the colorfully moistened soils of magical bogs, or mined from the deepest reaches of gem-laden caves. Smallish in scale and formally bizarre, the artist’s sculptures are enlivened not only by their organically, amiably bulbous, critterishly-planty, body-like forms, but also by their brilliant glazes and glistening colors. They might be earthly, and they might be extra-terrestrial. They might even be slinkily moving or gradually growing right before your eyes. Don’t be alarmed if they seem to make squishy noises as they reach and perch, pucker and pose, lunge and lurk, and as their porosities seem to respire. D’Arrigo’s works are somehow personable, relatable, and befriendable – and for the artist herself, they’re self-reflective and personal. The artist’s hand is everywhere present in, on, and even around, in a sense, these very handmade objects. At the same time, her pieces might also register as peculiar formations that have somehow, given unknown conditions, simply emerged into existence. D’Arrigo has mastered the material and procedural traditions of ceramics to create sculptures that double as lively paintings, and that become nearly animate before viewers’ eyes. Additionally fundamental to D’Arrigo’s reflective, expressive pursuit is to yield results that leave even her surprised.
Barry Katz’s work hovers and looms, beckons and recedes, flexes and bends, all the while dazzling viewers with vivid, saturated colors, and piquing their curiosities with strange forms, materialities, and textures. The hybrid nature of his works is readily apparent. Irregularly shaped and elegantly warped with bending edges and concavities, Katz’s objects so consummately double as sculptural paintings and painterly sculptures that they resist such labels as much as they seem to resist their very attachment to the walls. Each piece is overall monochromatic, yet enriched with a range of subtle tints and shades, and the artist’s punchy, popping colors share the same richness and allure as his pieces’ visual tactilities – which sometimes seem gummy or malleable, at other times as quiveringly delicate as the filamented flesh beneath the cap of a mushroom. With all this oddness, formal strangeness, and material questionability, Katz aims to provoke viewers to look at and into his work at once, instilling a mirroring, brow-furrowed mode of examination, reflection, endearment, and introspection. In this pensive, self-reflective act, Katz communes with his audience. “I like to think there is a kind of self-acceptance and inner calm beneath the irregular surfaces,” he remarks. “If I look hard enough, I can almost see it.”
The artists in Hybrid Histories find inspiration in manifold sources. Art history, formal precedents, material traditions, and personal narratives inform their practices, and they merge these into novel objects that revitalize such cues with chromatic vividness and compositional curiosities. Martiny’s, D’Arrigo’s, and Katz’s artworks embody life forces and disclose subtle emotions while evading, by way of hybridization, the relative ligatures of customary categorization.
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Donald Martiny has his artwork featured in the current Venice Biennale. He was born in Schenectady, NY in 1953, and studied at the School of the Visual Arts, The Art Students League in New York, New York University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His museum exhibitions include the FWMoA, Courtauld Institute of Art, Alden B Dow Museum of Art, Falmouth Museum, and the Cameron Art Museum. His work has been featured in the Huffington Post, NPR, Philadelphia Inquirer, VOGUE LIVING Australia, New American Paintings South, Decor Magazine, Hong Kong Tatler, and Woven Tale Press. His work is in the permanent collections of the One World Trade Center in New York City; the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, TX; the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA; the FWMoA, Fort Wayne, IN; and the Lamborghini Museum in Bologna, Italy. Other collections include the Grahm Gund Family Foundation, Cambridge, MA; Patrick Duffy, Chairman, Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV; The Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Erin Lawlor, Sainte-Marie de Re, France; City of Pont de Claix, France; John Hudson, New York, NY; Mae Gall, Basel, CH; C. Laville, Montreal, QC, Canada. His work is also displayed at Los Angeles International Airport. Martiny lives and works in Ivoryton, Connecticut.
Elisa D’Arrigo has recently exhibited sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has had 21 solo exhibitions, including at The High Museum of Art, David Beitzel Gallery, Luise Ross Gallery, Lehman College Art Gallery, and Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College. Upcoming solo and group exhibitions are planned at M. David & Co, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Pamela Salisbury Gallery and Elizabeth Harris Gallery, where she has had 11 solo exhibitions. Reviews, interviews and articles have appeared in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, Sculpture, Partisan Review, ArtPapers, ArtSpiel, Too Much Art, and The New York Observer, among others. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Everson Museum of Art, The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum. D’Arrigo currently lives and works in New York City.
Barry Katz has been making art for nearly half a century. Born in Baltimore in 1951, he received his BFA from MICA (the Maryland Institute College of Art) and spent the next decade working as an art director. Later, he devoted his attention to landscape painting, and studied privately with Wolf Kahn. His current body of work, which has been in development for the last decade, comprises abstract wall sculptures, undulating and curvilinear forms made of plaster and finished with multiple layers of encaustic in saturated colors, and has been shown in numerous galleries around the country. His work in photography also reflects this interest in layering, as in his extreme close-ups of torn, layered advertising posters on urban walls, and images of light falling on beach pebbles in shallow water along the beaches of Cape Cod. The latter of these were featured in a one-person exhibit in Provincetown, Mass. In 2016. Hybrid Histories marks his first major show in New York. Katz currently lives and works in Harlem.
