Group Show
“Dream Plane”
July 13 to August 23, 2024
Opening July 13, 2024 6:00pm
747 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles
Release
Fernberger is pleased to present Dream Plane, a group exhibition featuring historic works by Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, and Mary Obering, alongside new works by Anne Wehrley Björk, Elana Bowsher, Vicky Colombet, Violeta Maya, Alina Perkins, and Kiki Xuebing Wang. With practices extending across generations and geographies, Dream Plane considers the visions of female-identified artists who are invested in challenging perceptual realities—portraying the material world through a unique vocabulary of personal observation, self-mythology, and ancient history. Whether expressed through figuration, surrealism, or abstraction, these artists imbue two-dimensional planes with physical and psychic elasticity.
Dream Plane draws its title from an eponymous diptych by Obering (not included in this show, but on view in an upcoming exhibition at the Giuliani Foundation in Rome) in which horizontal planes of blue and white stretch across two arched canvases as if parallel windows overlooking an infinite skyline—a view that distills the earthly into the sublime. Throughout this exhibition, there recurs a devotion to a more expansive field of vision, an urgency for female-identified artists to conceive of alternative realities wherein their anima can wander freely, unencumbered by oppressive systems. Like a potent, fluid dream sequence, these artworks augment space with memory, symbology, and sensation—realms where the visible is infused with a heightened sense of wonder and possibility.
Installation Views
Violeta Maya
Violeta Maya (b. 1993, Spain) works and lives in Madrid. The painter makes lyrical compositions using pigments and acrylic on wet canvas to reflect her various emotional states. The nature of her methodology requires that she works quickly–before her canvases have a chance to dry, and stop accepting paint onto their surfaces. She therefore enters the studio with a premeditated idea of color palette and a general sense of formal structure, a plan. At times placid, whimsical, or tempestuous, Maya’s paintings offer a time capsule of whatever she experienced as she was making her work, and explore the potential for chance within a controlled set of parameters.
Maya received her BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include Todo en constante cambio y yo aquí observándolo, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2023); El Santo Al Cielo, Gallery BR, Tetbury, UK (2023) and A mi nadie me preguntó si quería nacer, pero bueno, aquí estoy, Alzueta Gallery, Madrid, ES (2022). She has recently been included in group exhibitions at Alzueta Gallery, Madrid, ES (2023); GÄRNA Gallery, Madrid, ES (2022); and Aprestadora Gallery, Barcelona, ES (2020).
Alina Perkins
Alina Perkins’ practice consists of sculpture, painting, and performance. Drawing from literature and cinema, Perkins depicts recognizable motifs but places them in a space that is ambiguously defined, suggesting the margins of another world. Figures appear and recede — sometimes merging with one another. The blurry edges of their forms nearly touch but resist confinement. Existing between figuration and abstraction, her compositions evoke a dream state or the sensation of a hazy memory. Objects take on new meaning, elements are substituted, perhaps to suggest the arbitrary nature of being. With an interest in the metaphysical, the esoteric, and the psychoanalytic, Perkins creates work that land somewhere between the real and the unreal.
Alina Perkins (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Perkins has studied at Licenciatura en Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, and most recently with Monika Baer at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include Free Energy, Zodiac Pictures, Los Angeles (2023), SALON, Amor Corp, Los Angeles (2022); Love Song, Sarah Brooke Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); TEKNOLUST: OBJECTOPHILIC FUTURES, Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Bar, Commercial Street, Los Angeles (2020).
Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington (b. 1917, Lancashire, UK, d. 2011, Mexico City) is a British-Mexican painter. Carrington’s works are closely associated with surrealism in content and form as well as her physical proximity to the group throughout her career. Though, Carrington never formally aligned herself with surrealist ideology. Instead, her sensibilities lead her to the exploration and investigation of the mysterious and the sacred, uncoupled from specifics, or attempts to understand.
Carrington’s lithograph prints from 1974 were created during her time in Mexico City, an environment where she felt liberated from the male-dominated surrealist movement she orbited in Europe. Mexico, fertile with mysticism, inspired Carrington to infuse her scenes with otherworldly creatures and phantasms—encouraged by fellow artists like Remedios Varo, whose imaginative canvases offered a kindred illusionism.
Leonora Carrington has shown work internationally in solo shows at the AKREN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj; Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite, New York; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; and Biblioteca de México Ciudadela, Mexico City among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Galleries of Scotland; The Tate, London; and the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa.
Anne Wehrley Björk
Anne Wehrley Björk (b. 1948), lives and works between Lexington, KY and Charleston, SC, and originally hails from New Mexico, which has deeply inflected her work. Chaco Canyon, near where she grew up in Northwest New Mexico, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the ancestral home of the prehistoric Anasazi Indians. It is one of only 130 international sites designated as a “Dark Sky Park'', where the night sky is devoid of any light pollution. Bjork’s current body of work is an investigation into this landscape of her youth, as well as its very particular light quality. The pathways, sandstone walls, and the petroglyphs of the Anasazi ruins there etched in her mind. Despite an affinity towards abstraction, in Björk’s own words, “There is a subtle narrative that takes place to be discerned by the viewer. Boulders appear poised to fall while a demi-lune floats in others. The light of turbulent skies adds dynamism in some of the paintings, while an Impressionist use of juxtaposed warm and cool colors create a softness in others, and crepuscule [dusk], overtakes the forms in others.”
The arc of Björk’s career resembles that of many female painters of her generation--despite beginning her career in the 1970s, her work is finally gaining broader recognition now, later in her career. During her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico, she trained with Agnes Martin, Joan Brown, Susan Rothenberg, and Deborah Butterfield, fellow women artists similarly drawn to the atmospheric quality specific to New Mexico, who encouraged her practice. Her commitment to the subject of Chaco Canyon has been consistent throughout, a constant in a career underpinned by a thorough investigation of light, color, and form.
Vicky Colombet
Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris) lives and works between the Hudson Valley, New York City and Paris.
Colombet was raised in Paris by her French father and Filipino mother, who traveled extensively throughout Asia with her. These early travels and exposure to eastern culture and philosophy proved incredibly influential in her later artistic development.
While studying at the Sorbonne, Colombet was enveloped in a progressive Parisian Intelligentsia. Helmed by Simone de Beauvoir, Colombet co-founded the "Women's Rights League" and the newspaper, "The Feminist News". She also collaborated with iconic French actress and outspoken Feminist Delphine Seyrig on several Feminist projects including her film "Be Pretty and Shut Up" (1981).
Colombet began her career as a painter in her early twenties, studying in the atelier of French painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986), who introduced Colombet to a painstaking process of deconstructed painting involving grinding and mixing raw pigments with various solvents (oil, copal, plaster and water) from which Colombet evolved and created her own technique. Experimenting with the weights of pigments, their type of granulation, chemical response, their specific vibrations and steps for grinding, she creates her otherworldly compositions.
In the early 1980s, during a time when painting was declared “dead”, Colombet created a type of painting that did not announce itself as painting. With the aim of pausing viewers upon encountering her work, Colombet developed her singular style and methodology of painting to resemble photochemical development processes or even a form of printing, but distinctly not painting. Despite using incredibly traditional painting materials, Colombet’s obfuscation of her own hand in the work presents something iconoclastic and enigmatic.
As she developed her own style and technique of painting, Colombet also embarked on a deeper study of Buddhism (to which she had been exposed during her childhood travels) with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Her initial rigorous study at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and her continued Buddhist practice have tremendously affected her work.
Her flattened but incredibly dimensional works have the power to evoke Buddhist concepts of oneness–that the macro and the micro exist on the same continuum. Partnered with her existing interest in the works of painters with ethereal, mathematical and philosophical leanings such as Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, Colombet has developed a style completely her own. She believes the use of pure pigment, chemical compounds born of the cosmos, gives unique vibrations and emotional resonance to her work.
In the intervening years, Colombet has shown her work extensively internationally. She was recently the subject of the exhibition, “Unexpected Dialogue: Monet/Colombet” that paired her work with Claude Monet’s at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, for which the museum produced an exhibition catalogue. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, as well as several international private collections. She has been awarded the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).
Gertrude Abercrombie
Gertrude Abercrombie (b. 1909, Austin, d. 1977, Chicago) studied at the University of Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A central fixture of Chicago’s mid century jazz and Hyde Park Arts scene, Abercrombie is often coined the “queen of bohemian artists.” Her painted dreamscapes feature recurring motifs inspired by her daily life, grounding components of her fantastical scenes in an identifiable reality. Abercrombie explains, “Surrealism is for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream.”
Selected solo exhibitions include the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Karma, New York; Illinois State Museum, Springfield; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Abercrombie’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Illinois State Museum, Springfield; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Mary Obering
Mary Obering was born in 1937 in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received a BA in Psychology at Hollins College in 1959. She studied calculus at Radcliffe College (Harvard’s women’s college) and did post bachelor work in experimental psychology with BF Skinner at Harvard shortly after. She received an MFA in painting from the University of Denver in June 1971, and shortly thereafter she moved to NYC.
In the early 1970s, Obering began exploring minimalist painting’s ability to push beyond its internal pictorial space, generating a technique uniquely her own. Within this same decade the artist abandoned her canvas support, beginning to paint on Masonite panels with a variety of approaches. Obering’s exploration found fertile ground with the introduction of mediums which would become the artist’s signature over the next four decades: egg tempera and gold leaf. In employing Old Masters techniques, the artist envisioned a blending of architecture and painting; the antique artworks produced with these materials inevitably recalling the churches and buildings in which they were housed. The paintings created with these unexpected materials were presented by some of New York’s most daring and respected galleries in the 1980s and 1990s, Julian Pretto, Annina Nosei, and John Weber.
Obering’s 1983 work "Analog," was painted during a period when the artist frequently traveled to Salento, Italy, a southern region of Puglia where she studied traditional techniques for applying egg tempera and gold leaf—materials used to ornament the altars of Catholic cathedrals and reliquaries. Situating these historically rich tones in a minimalist composition, Obering conveys an essence of the divine unrestrained by iconography.
Obering’s works have been included in exhibitions at 1975 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Artists Space, New York; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; The Denver Art Museum and Nelson-Atkins Museum among others. Her works are in theermanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Elana Bowsher
Elana Bowsher (b. 1990, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. A tenet of Bowshers’s work is that of duality. Her paintings embrace a legacy of abstraction in which the real, and the identifiable is distorted to the point where only a sensual idea remains. Contained within her paintings is a multitude of binaries: hard, stark brush strokes nestled against and enveloped by soft, hazy ones; identifiable forms posed next to just out of reach, hazy, deconstructed marks. Bowsher’s compositions are contingent on and carefully balanced upon these relations. Bending and billowing, her works carefully construct their own divine geometry and logic, while simultaneously referencing the natural world in its fullness.
Bowsher received her BA in art at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture in 2012. Elana Bowsher is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Alexander Berggruen, New York; T923, Rome; Sea View, Los Angeles; Lo Butto Stahl, Paris; and Phillips, Los Angeles.
Kiki Xuebing Wang
Kiki Xuebing Wang (b. 1993, Zhengzhou, China) currently lives and works in London. Working with oil paints, Wang creates translucent surfaces by building up multiple thin layers and sometimes smudging off each layer over and over again. For subjects, she is drawn to recognizable objects like flowers, seashells, and sometimes even umbrellas, that have their own regularized sense of geometry and pattern. Leaning into these patterns, Wang employs her arduous process to yield delicately fractured compositions. In her own words, “I used to look at a lot of paintings from the Bay Area Figurative Movement, painters like Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, when I was studying and living on the West Coast for a few years. It has taught me to look at a painting in a different way from its combination of figurative and abstraction both seen in the figurative paintings. I am also influenced by Impressionist painters such as Cezanne, Gauguin, and Manet. They capture momentary and essence without details.” Through her paintings, Wang explores the complexities of perception, acknowledging that it often veers far from capturing the whole truth. Her work invites viewers to contemplate the intricacies of human experience, challenging them to confront the fragmented nature of reality and the subjective nature of perception.
Wang’s solo exhibitions include: “Ripples,” Linseed Projects, Shanghai, CN (2023); “Marble Dessert,” Ginny on Fredrick x Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK (2023); “Lapwings,” Half Gallery, New York, US (2022). Kiki Xuebing Wang’s works have been presented in group exhibitions including: “Notes Toward a Shell,” Tara Downs, New York, US (2024); “Tie up,” Linseed Projects, Seoul, KR (2023); “The Connection,” Billytown, The Hague, NL (2022); “A Place of One’s Own, Andrea fest Fine Art, Rome, IT (2022); “Harmonious Arrangement,” Half Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2022). The artist completed her BA at University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, US) in 2016, and received MA at Royal College of Art (London, UK) in 2020. BIOGRAPHY
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