New Realism: Looking Forward and Back
After running galleries in New York for the past decade, Isabel Sullivan launched her eponymous gallery in the heart of Tribeca’s design and gallery district at 39 Lispenard Street.
The Gallery launched a group show on March 14 and will conclude on April 21 of this year. There was an opening reception for New Realism: Looking Forward and Back , which was held on March 14, 6 pm-8 pm. The exhibition features six New York-based artists, New Realism: Looking Forward and Back, curated by/featuring recent works of Neil Jenney (who has remained ardently committed to curating & exhibiting shows associated with Realism) alongside recent works by Elisa Jensen, Victor Leger, Joseph Santore, Mercer Tullis, and Frank Webster (Santore was also teacher to both Jensen & Webster). The show will feature approx. 30 works and the gallery is currently filming mini-documentaries about each artist to be played at the gallery during the show. Through Jenney’s painted, sculptural skyscapes, to Jensen’s shadowed, yet vibrant, intimate interiors, to Santore’s dynamic and existential paintings reflecting the human condition, to Tullis’ meditative yet piercing graphite works, and finally to Webster and Leger’s serene topographical canvases, the gallery poses the question: what is Realism today? Their reflections of nature and humanity are presented for us to behold, to momentarily possess and perhaps to stir a particular affect. The exhibition presents a survey of artists looking both forward and back – painting through the tides of today; attached is a small sampling from each artist of what will be shown (2 images for each artist, plus an initial artworks list with 18 works).
Installation view Realism Today: Looking Forward and Back, Isabel Sullivan Gallery New York, New York, March 14- April 21 2024, photo @ Isabel Sullivan Gallery
A myriad of iterations of Realism have emerged since its inception in late 19th century France. Gustave Courbet and Jean-Francois Millet sought to convey truth and objectivity through embodied depictions of modern life and its array of social classes. German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz’s meticulous Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) paintings, created during the short-lived Weimar Republic, responded to the brutality of the First World War. Their American counterparts, Edward Hopper and George Bellows, created a new American visual idiom through their depictions of the urbanization of America and its shifting class structures. Despite the disparate geographical production of these Realist painters, what each respective iteration shares most prominently is their emergence and proliferation following great moments of social, political, or cultural change. The past few years have been no exception to this artistic penchant, as there has been an increase in artists turning to themes intrinsic to Realism, and a recommitment to time-honored subjects, such as genre, landscape, and figurative. Realism has always functioned primarily as a means to record our epoch and its dwellers, however in its present context, the paintings included in this show possess both objectivity and expression.
Realism Today: Looking Forward and Back presents a selection of paintings that utilize various concepts and technical aspects of Realism, which today stands as the rebirth of the three-dimensional picture plane, and a turning away from abstraction. The artists included explore both internal and external space, the natural world and urban life, memory, and imagination, offering a respite from the modern world.
More on the artists:
Neil Jenney - Neil Jenney is an American painter and sculptor born in 1945, in Torrington, Connecticut, and working in New York City. His last solo exhibition was at Gagosian gallery, titled AMERICAN REALISM TODAY, from November 9, 2021–January 29, 2022 at 976 Madison Avenue, New York.
Neil Jenney - Morning (2022, acrylic on canvas 18x32in)
Elisa Jensen - Elisa Jensen (b. 1965, Bridgeport, CT) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has received awards for her work from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Academy Museum, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Elisa graduated from Smith College and the New York Studio School. She currently teaches at the New York Studio School and Pratt Institute.
Elisa Jensen - Brooklyn Morning (oil on wood panel 20x16in).
Victor Leger - Leger was born in 1961 in Canada. He studied at Pratt Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s. He splits his time between Connecticut and Maine, and was discovered in New York by Neil Jenney. Leger is also a woodworker, building his own frames.
Victor Leger - Elegy to R. Motherwell, no. 25 (2021, oil on panel 55x43x3in)
Joseph Santore - Santore was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His work was chosen for the poster of the 1991 Whitney Biennial. His works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Staten Island Museum, National Academy of Design, NY, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, The Aspen Art Museum. Santore is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Cincinnati Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN, National Academy of Design, NY, Phoenix Art Museum; Rhode Island School of Design, Tucson Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Denver Art Museum, among others. Santore was a teacher at the New York Studio School, where he taught artist Elisa Jensen, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting, where he taught Frank Webster.
Joseph Santore - The Studio (2024, watercolorand gouache on paper 35x49in).
Mercer Tullis - Tullis was born in 1994 in New York. Mercer began formally studying at the Art Students League in 2013, taking drawing classes under Robert Cenedella, whose studio was across the hall from the loft he grew up in. Soon after beginning at the Art Students League, Mercer began assisting realist & “bad painting” pioneer Neil Jenny. Tullis is a self-taught painter and woodworker, building all of his own frames.
Mercer Tullis - Officers (2016-2018, oil on gessoed ply 50.25x39.25x2.50in).
Frank Webster - Webster was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1966, and received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Some of the residencies he has been granted include the Arctic Circle Residency, Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland, the NES Artist Residency in Iceland, The Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. He has participated in many group and solo exhibitions at museums and galleries, such as the Zimmerli Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Steffany Martz Gallery, the Parrish Art Museum, Blackston Gallery, and many others. In early 2022, Webster was commissioned to execute The Stone—a monumental Icelandic landscape—by the Durst Organization for the library for the newly constructed SVEN residential project in Long Island City, New York. Webster currently lives and works in Queens, New York.
Frank Webster - Hunafloi Bay (2020, acrylic on canvas 36x84in).
