YOU AGAIN

CURATED BY FRANKLIN EVANS

PEDRO BARBEITO, JACKIE GENDEL, ELLIOTT GREEN, JOSEPHINE HALVORSON, FABIAN MARCACCIO, TOM MCGRATH, TRACY MILLER, ANN PIBAL, and ERIC WOLF

"For my artist selection, I established a condition of including only artists who have entered my studio / brain space to such a degree that it has compelled me to have painted a part from each of the artists' past paintings into my own paintings."

- Franklin Evans

"Pedro Barbeito's paintings draw from the space we cannot see, both in the space behind a painting on a wall and in the space that extends out into the cosmos. He squeezes all of the unseen onto a mapping of material that becomes a painting we do see. In his space surrounding his appropriation of Constantin Brancusi’s "Endless Column," he builds a futuristic world of the present as viewed from an earlier time—a “You Again” as retro forward sci-fi."

- Franklin Evans

"I remember meeting Jackie Gendel for the first time in 2004 when I visited her Williamsburg studio. In an onslaught of painting research, she had plowed through what seemed like 400 paintings. She was examining the re-emergent field of painterly figuration (most notably found in the paintings of Dana Schutz). At that studio visit, I saw the emergence of the first of a group of paintings that have come to define her own painting plane. They emerged almost in the same way that I see her figures emerge out of the color and material of paint, in a space between firm depiction and pareidolia."

- Franklin Evans

"Elliott Green gives us a beautiful, strange world of colliding landscapes, which he achieves by applying a wide array of techniques that sometimes set nearby “stable” zones into pulsing motion. I see bravado along with an almost humbling apology in the way the beautiful is delivered. It’s as if he is saying, with a blush, “I am sorry for how easy it is."

- Franklin Evans

"I recall first seeing a Josephine Halvorson painting at a Lower East Side gallery in the mid/late aughts. I was struck by her empathetic painterly touch and by how smartly she framed the image of her subject. She continues to emphasize the power of limits in both painting and looking, and asks us to consider slowly and more fully what one sees from a concentrated place of extended focus – here in "Memento Mori" (2008) and "Mrs. Mary" (2021) – a focus, which has the potential to transport the viewer to see and understand a subject beyond the limits of her frame."

- Franklin Evans

"Fabian Marcaccio uses the post-Duchampian demise of painting as the material for his expanded field painting practice. 3D printing, silicone (goods foreign to Marcel Duchamp), and other materials are wildly woven together, using painting’s ruptures to open the narrow hole through which Duchamp's "Étant donnés" was once viewed."

- Franklin Evans

"My visit to Tom McGrath's studio in the late aughts was among the most impressive studio visits I have had over the past twenty-plus years. I felt as if I had dropped into an alchemist's lab. It is no surprise that his physical exploration of materials, which approaches a kind of science, yields magical light and color spaces, and risky painting acrobatics that demand a bold and very active mind."

- Franklin Evans

"I first “met” Tracy Miller when I was in graduate school in the early 1990s. She had just left Iowa City for a graduate school on the West Coast and had made an impression on the Iowa faculty that was strong enough for them to share her painting cornucopia with me. Her painting banquet serves fish, fruit, beer, and cake on a canvas/table/stage of abundant paint spills and traces of consumption and play, which nourishes in its own way."

- Franklin Evans

"I met Ann Pibal in 1992 in Iowa City. We were graduate school painters in the same program (but different years) at the University of Iowa. I have followed her work in New York at The Drawing Center, at MoMA PS1, and even in this room. Her "Lull" hung in the exact same location in 2008 when it was shown by the former gallerist Max Protetch."Lull," to a remarkable degree, is Abigail at the 7B Bar, on the same stool in 2020 as the one in 1991, from Debra Jo Immergut’s "You Again," the novel that inspired the pairing of past with present in this exhibition."

- Franklin Evans

I met Eric Wolf in 1994 in New York City (near the same year that Abigail, the protagonist in Debra Jo Immergut’s novel “You Again,” arrived as a young artist in New York). I later visited Eric during his residency at Blue Mountain, where he made his hypnotic painting "Water." I have known Eric and his wonderful paintings for twenty-seven years. They have focused on Mooselookmeguntic Lake, in northern Maine, an artistic approach that is parallel and admirably close to that of Paul Cézanne in his Mont Sainte-Victoire series."

- Franklin Evans