Garvey|Simon | Through 1/31 | New York, NY

Select Five

Garvey|Simon presents the web-exclusive exhibition Select 5 with artists from its Review Program.

Garvey|Simon in New York is a private dealer and art advisory service in New York. In 2016, it’s co-founder Elizabeth K. Garvey devised an innovative Review Program “to open a dialogue between artists and galleries, a practice that has long been anathema to gallery orthodoxy.” In its fifth appearance, the exhibition, titled Select 5, continues to be innovative, appearing online at artsy.net through January 31. The artists are Barbara Cowlin, Kristy Gordon, Karl Hartman, Marilyn Holsing, Amy Laskin, Jennifer Presant, Mel Prest, Buket Savci, Joy Taylor and Kit Warren.

The exhibition gives emerging and midcareer artists an opportunity to show and sell their work. The artist/gallery benefits are reciprocal. Garvey notes, “It continues to be an enormously validating and enjoyable experience for me. The artists I have met through the years are amazingly strong and have truly added to the caliber of our program.”Karl Hartman, Fourth of July, oil on canvas over board, 34 x 34"

The work ranges from abstract to realism and involves multiple media.

Prest’s linear non-objective paintings appear straight out of op art but almost immediately exhibit a visceral vibrancy far more interesting than the slick emotionless work of op. Prest’s paintings are about color and light, show her hand and are, in her words, “perceptual puzzles that tangle the illusion of two-dimensional space.”

A Sound for a Bell is a synesthetic experience of line, color, texture and depth. “I mean to create a meditative and charged space with my paintings,” she says, “which are inspired by landscapes, translating the color and rhythms I’ve observed in natural phenomena like sunsets.”Joy Taylor, Details #6, acrylic on canvas, 50 x 43"

Mel Prest, A Sound for a Bell, acrylic and metallic acrylic on panel, 12 x 12 x 2"

With neither depth nor detail, Taylor creates botanical still lifes that convince the viewer of their veracity and invite further investigation of nature for its form and color. In Details #6, the sinuous forms and colors recall the fecundity of the organic world. Garvey observes, “Joy Taylor’s abstracted florals are both organic and artificial. Petals, leaves and stems are transfigured into platforms and throughways, gleefully straying into the realm of design and pattern.”

Hartman’s Fourth of July is a scene in “a part of the country that is spare, quiet and infinitely dynamic,” he says, “beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. The way the horizon is blocked only by the curvature of the earth, or the way sky and weather can dominate space, a simple drifting cloud and shadow, or grasshoppers scattering before boots in deep grass, a tree can stand utterly alone on the high plains or light from a distant town might reflect on low stratus clouds at night from miles and miles away all take on a unique emphasis on the plains.”Buket Savci, The Raft, oil on canvas, 35 x 50"

In the work, utilitarian pickup trucks given over to pleasure for a day, line up above a lake, towing the pleasure craft they will soon launch for a day of boating and celebration. Families that have preceded them leave curving wakes on the lake that echo the curves of the clouds in the vast sky. —

Garvey|Simon By appointment only • New York, NY • (917) 796-2146 • www.garveysimon.com