Circles and Ellipses
Curated by Ellen Hackl Fagan
April 7 – May 2, 2023
Opening reception: Friday, April 7, 6-8 pm
37-39 Clinton St., New York, 10002
Image: Liz Jaff, Blow,2014, hand-cut paper, 37 x 25.75 x 1.50 in
New York, NY- Space 776 is pleased to present Circles and Ellipses – a five-person exhibition masterfully curated by Ellen Hackl Fagan (Artist, Curator, and Founder of ODETTA gallery). Featuring artists: Charles Birnbaum, Sue Carlson, the Estate of David Hayes, Tayo Heuser, and Liz Jaff. The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of artist Jane Harris, whose focus on circles and ellipses inspired this exhibition.
The five artists in this exhibition have spent much of their careers focused on the most primal forms of design, the circle, and the ellipse. These archetypes can be found in human art forms across the planet, and throughout our time as humans, even before the Neanderthals. From inscribed lines cut into the stone, minerals smudged and painted on earthen walls, tools, dwellings, and on, and on, these two forms create the subject, from which innumerable meanings and uses spring forth.
This is but a small glimpse of the many artists making artwork today who also focus on these simple, yet expansive forms. While sharing a similar source the final images and objects created are as unique as the individual creators themselves. The unifying element for this exhibition is their shared instinct to employ a reductive, yet rigorous focus.
Ranging from minute intricate details to upscaled objects and sculptures in steel, these artists fluidly transition between the ephemeral and the permanent.
The Estate of David Hayes is part of the exhibition with works in painted steel as well as plaster over styrofoam studies, which scale up from small works to mid-size. The styrofoam studies were housed safely on the artist’s Coventry, CT farmhouse, never before exhibited, for over fifty years. Like eggs in an incubator, when the artist’s son, David Hayes, Jr. opened the old studio door, they immediately brought Brancusi’s studio in Paris at the Pompidou Center to mind for the curator. The exhibition re-creates a small vignette of the interior of the studio, utilizing shelving from the barn/studio, and stacking the sculptures like they are in situ.
