Participating artists are: Cora Cohen, Amy Feldman, Sarah Gamble, Andrew Guenther, Elizabeth Huey and Kurt Lightner.

Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of six contemporary painters in our second installment of this now annual invitation. The title “Assembly” is chosen to reflect the diverse approaches and subjects to be found within current art practice.

Each work in the exhibit foregrounds technique and a desire to push their subject matter, through a conflation of representation and abstraction, by incorporating humor or by creating hybrids of high and low cultural forms.

Cora Cohen ‘s improvised and often brooding works meld calligraphic line; the paintings are based on pictograms of Linear B script, which carves through and conjoins with an atmospheric color surfaces. These works emanate a lyricism and configuration that authenticates the artist’s belief that painting is fundamentally a language. Produced in variations of gray Amy Feldman’s large-sized compositions appear both spontaneous and premeditated. Her physically imposing paintings are created with apparently effortless means. Loosely constructed geometric forms, awkward, ungainly yet carefully modulated, create fields of tension and anxiety. Sarah Gamble’s vision is produced by an intuitive approach to both abstract and figurative imagery .Her spontaneous use of mark-making reveals otherworldly narratives of ethereal landscapes, figures trapped in architectural frameworks and animal forms emerging from the soil manifesting free associative combinations of mythology and sci fi. Working with a diverse array of media Andrew Guenther’s imagery presents a wide range of concerns, often playful always with the utmost clarity. His innovative vision is sourced from popular culture, high modernism, music and nature producing sophisticated improvisations that reflect our collective consciousness With works often using images sourced from vintage material incorporating postcards and advertisements, Elizabeth Huey uses painting to translate these fragments from the past thereby recreating her own interpretations of historic subjects such as modernist architecture of mental health clinics or health spas, hotels and pools. Her subject matter, which conjoins the present with the past, produces psychologically charged works that are steeped in nostalgia for our recent history and laced with a dramatic urgency. Drawing on the landscape of his native Ohio Kurt Lightner produces willfully overloaded dynamic compositions that are built on the dramatic discourse between man and nature. His paintings are produced by an amalgamation of energetic brushstrokes, operating with the dual purpose of description and destruction, in which a new order of synthesis emerges from the chaos.