STOREFRONT (16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn) is pleased to present new paintings by GREG KWIATEK. Also on exhibit in the backroom at Storefront will be a group exhibition titled GROUNDWORK: landscape, materiality, and terrain, featuring new work by Beth Ganz, Letha Wilson, and Rena Leinberger. An opening reception for the artists will be held Friday, March 25, from 6-9PM. Storefront is open weekends 1-6PM or by appointment by calling 646-361-8512. For more information visit www.storefrontbk.com

For several years, GREG KWIATEK has been making paintings concerned with natural atmospheres. “Atmosfera,” as the artist calls his new body of work, are paintings, modest in size, that represent his interest in the nocturnal condition. Through a slow evolution, Kwiatek combines figuration, nuance, fantasia, and subjectivity into a quiet moment frozen in time.

Kwiatek was born in 1948 in Pittsburgh, PA, and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Kwiatek lived and worked in Cologne, Germany, from 1985 to 1987. The Kunstraum-Munchen mounted a one-person exhibition of his work in 1985. He frequently exhibited throughout the 1990’s at AC Project Room in New York. He was recently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Korn Gallery at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey (2010), and Melville House Books in Brooklyn, New York (2010). His numerous group exhibitions include “Utopia Dystopia” at Storefront Gallery in Bushwick (2010); “Paul Bloodgood, Leonard Bullock, Greg Kwiatek” at David Zwirner, New York (2008); “Six Billion Perps Held Hostage!” at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2007); and “Super Natural” at the Center Gallery at Fordam University in New York (2006). He has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The artist has been a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York since 2003. He will exhibit in “From the Pages Edge” at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA; William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey; the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont (2011); and “Leiko Ikemura, Greg Kwiatek” at Ulrike Jagla Ausstellung in Cologne, Germany (2011). His numerous collectors include The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Deborah Brown and Eric Ploumis (New York), Paul Bloodgood and Kelly Adams (New York), Anne Chu (New York), Alissa Friedman and Glenn Petry (New York), Rafael Jablonka, (Cologne), Aurel Scheibler (Berlin), Dirk Schroeder and Christine Rossini (Cologne), and David and Monica Zwirner (New York).

AND IN THE BACKROOM: GROUNDWORK: landscape, materiality, and terrain, featuring new work by Beth Ganz, Letha Wilson, and Rena Leinberger.

BETH GANZ graduated with honors from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY with a B.F.A. in 1972. She has been a member of Manhattan Graphic Center since 1987 where she teaches classes in photogravure and other intaglio printmaking methods. Ganz has held solo exhibitions in New York and South Carolina and her prints have been included in many group shows in the United States as well as England, Europe, and India since 1989. In 2006, Ganz’s solo show, Beth Ganz: New Work, was on display at

APF Gallery, New York, NY. Ganz’s work is also represented in public and private collections including the Tommy Hilfiger Collection; Hofstra Museum, Hempstead, NY; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; New York Public Library, New York, NY; and U.S. Department of State Art Bank.

Using photogravures of trees and shadows in both negative and positive, this new work reflects impressionistic and decorative representations of nature. The flux between the surface of the image and the photograph’s illusory depth alludes to landscape painting’s historical legacy of bringing inside the outside, of offering a window onto another world. The element of nostalgia imparted by the nineteenth century process of photogravure is at once maintained and disrupted by the play between negative and positive, surface and depth simultaneously encouraging and foiling escape into contrived worlds, much like traditional landscape painting.

LETHA WILSON is a mixed media artist who was born in Honolulu, raised in Colorado and currently lives in Brooklyn. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University, and an MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Letha’s artwork has been shown at many venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Exit Art, White Box, Frederieke Taylor Gallery and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2009 Letha was a resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award.

Wilson uses images and materials from the natural landscape as a starting point for interpretation and confrontation. Her work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness. In the photo-based sculptures the ability for a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon, and questioned; sculptural intervention attempts to compensate for the photograph’s failure to encompass the physical site it represents. Landscape photography as a genre is approached with equal parts reverence and skepticism. In another body of work, site-specific installations juxtapose re-claimed wood and drywall material in innovative ways that respond to both interior and outdoors environments, and comment on the glut of material discarded in the contemporary art exhibition cycle.

RENA LEINBERGER has exhibited in solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois of Chicago, Zg Gallery, the Evanston Art Center and 1R Gallery; she has been included in group exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts and CUE Art Foundation in New York; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, the City of San Antonio International Center, among others. She has been selected for several awards, including a fellowship in the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and a sponsored residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been reviewed in publications including Sculpture Magazine, FiberArts, Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, Bridge Magazine, mouthtomouth and the Brooklyn Rail.

Images and building materials taken from the related processes of construction and entropy form the basis of Rena Leinberger’s work. The sites and landscapes created by these removals and rebuildings are ordinary, ubiquitous, yet socially charged spaces. She dislocates objects, structures and images of these environments and rebuilds them with shifts in materials determined through a reciprocal logic. Ordinary construction materials are allowed to stand in for elements of the image or other materials and objects. The substitutions are aesthetically slight – it looks about like what it is – and flimsier than the original. The reality they begin to project are simulations of the idea of reality, and often the simulations are also duplicated. The constructed idea, or abstracted constructed idea, is a confounding experience that produces an inquiry into notions of material failure, artifice, collapse, and the collapse of ideologies that accompany our architectures.

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STOREFRONT was started by Jason Andrew and Deborah Brown. It is Bushwick’s leading gallery presenting both emerging young talent and established historically significant artists. Its exhibition program has been the featured in ARTNET MAGAZINE, THE CITYist, TIME OUT NEW YORK, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, NEW YORK PRESS, NEW YORK POST, THE NEW CRITERION, L MAGAZINE, THE BROOKLYN RAIL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, WNYC, and written about locally including BUSHWICKBK, GREENPOINT GAZETTE, WILLIAMSBURG GREENPOINT NEWS + ARTS.

HOURS: Weekends 1:00-6:00PM or by appointment 646-361-8512.

DIRECTIONS: L train to Brooklyn, Morgan Avenue Stop. Walk four blocks on Morgan to Flushing Avenue. Cross Flushing Avenue to Wilson Avenue. The gallery is located between Noll and George Streets.