Allegra LaViola Gallery is pleased to present Monumental and Piccolini, two separate but related exhibitions curated by artist Jennifer Riley. The show opens on Friday, March 26 and closes on April 24, and there will be an artists’ talk at a date and time to be announced.

The sprawling upper gallery is host to monumentally scaled works by sculptors Doreen McCarthy and Don Gummer and painters Jim Long and Craig Fisher. One or two large and over-scaled works represent each of the four mid-career artists in Monumental. McCarthy’s inflated pink vinyl sculpture loops through space while Gummer’s painted aluminum constructions are linear and planar; and Long’s eccentrically shaped single color paintings stand beside Fisher’s unprimed, stained cotton canvases. While the works in Monumental are seemingly disparate, they relate to each other in refreshingly strong visual terms and all employ their elemental or simple shapes to mine out complex themes. Most of the works on view are new and are seen here for the first time in New York.

The lower level of the gallery contains a body of smaller scaled works in various media by the aforementioned four artists and five younger contemporaries: David Brody, Holly Miller, Tony Ingrisano, Yasamin Keshtkar and Craig Olson. In contrast to the upper gallery, this one features a denser collection of modestly scaled drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and hybrid works. Monumental / Piccolini brings together works from different generations that participate in similar explorations of process, concept or aesthetic concerns.

The curatorial impulse for Monumental is to present a diverse group of artists who, with great attention to high craft and nuance, make bold statements of color and form. The large-scale work echoes the sweeping scale of Allegra LaViola Gallery while sharing resolve and confidence, and a firm grounding in a studio practice. Piccolini expresses the telescoping growth of ideas found in the same vein and whose aesthetic attributes, despite varying intents and motivations, also produce strong visual experiences.