Jeff Bailey Gallery and Andrea Meislin Gallery are pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring 70 artists who use gouache in their work. The exhibition is curated by Geoffrey Young and opens February 15th, 6-8pm, with a reception at both galleries.

Gouache, an opaque watercolor, dries fast and yields a bright matte finish. A veteran medium—it has been around for millennia—gouache can be bold, subtle, dense, or airy, depending on the shaping hand. For many it has become the medium of choice for works on paper.

Well-known artists such as Kay Rosen, Thomas Nozkowski, James Siena, Dike Blair, Judith Linhares, Bruce Pearson, Amy Sillman, Fred Tomaselli, Barbara Takenaga, and Steve diBenedetto will be joined by mid-career and younger emerging artists who’ve found something fresh to say in the medium.

Examples of the latter are Jessica Hess (pitch-perfect urban doorways defaced with graffiti), Erik Schoonebeek (architectural fantasies painted on old cloth book covers), Alexander Gorlizki (Indian miniatures), Garth Weiser (bright abstractions with slanting light, ambiguous depth & variously combed surfaces), Julie Evans (mandalas in hot light), Don Doe (infants suckling louche Madonnas), David Ambrose and Robin Mitchell (dense layerings of matted color), Clint Jukkala (stylized robot katchinas), Scott Brodie (plates of advertising food), and Fred Valentine (kitschy houses with their reflections in water).

Lucas Reiner will have images of trees altered by power lines and Los Angeles traffic, Derek Buckner will have birds-eye views of the dense, urban life of blocky buildings and looping highway systems, visited by flying saucers, Katia Santibanez will show abstractions based on observation of plant forms, Zoe Pettijohn will show textural conflations of pattern and figure, and Louise Belcourt her sweeping views of the North Atlantic as seen through a coastline of sculptural hedges.

Abstraction and representation will vie for supremacy, while fantasy and imagination attempt to steal the show. Kirsten Deirup’s room interiors and detritus filled landscapes will stun the unsuspecting, as will Morgan Bulkeley’s bees hovering over recreations of his now decaying outdoor sculpture.

The show will prove that gouache is a medium through which the creative juices of several generations of artists can flow with terrific, unpredictable results.

Participating artists: Kay Rosen, Warren Isensee, Thomas Nozkowski, Oona Ratcliffe, Louise Belcourt, Garth Weiser, Jessica Hess, Derek Buckner, Joyce Robins, Philip Knoll, Zohar Lazar, Alexander Gorlizki, Erik Schoonebeek, James Siena, Max Maslansky, Judith Linhares, Don Doe, Gary Petersen, Katia Santibanez, Fred Tomaselli, Cary Smith, Lucas Reiner, Scott Brodie, Sophie de Garam, Beth Shipley, Fred Valentine, Erick Johnson, Larissa Bates, Barbara Takenaga, Ann Wolf, Sutton Hayes, Sue Havens, Steve di Benedetto, Dike Blair, Quentin Curry, Dan Schmidt, Amy Sillman, Chie Fueki, Elena Sisto, Bruce Pearson, Zoe Pettijohn, Kathryn Myers, Jim Gaylord, Julie Gross, Robin Mitchell, Sue Muskat, Kirsten Deirup, Clint Jukkala, Andrew Small, Jason Stewart, Jackie Saccoccio, Morgan Bulkeley, Walton Ford, Heather Brammeier, Linda Stillman, Nichole Van Beek, Cynthia Atwood, David Ambrose, Chuck Webster, Will Yackulic, Ann Thornycroft, Jared Sprecher, Lisa Sanditz, Katherine Bradford, Michelle Segre, Benji Whalen, Deborah Kass, Liam Everett, Sarah Bernneman, Martin McMurray and Julie Evans.