Phong Bui - Bill Jensen - Margrit Lewczuk - Nathlie Provosty: Bui Jensen Lewczuk Provosty
The idea of this exhibit arose from their long-nurtured friendships and genuine shared love of art and culture. Together they explore the themes of pairs, parallels, and patterns in this exhibit, with the pure pleasure of camaraderie, including the diversity that allows them to remain friends with their growth in perpetual tact.
Phong Bui (b. 1964, Huế, Vietnam; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) is an artist, writer, independent curator and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1 from 2007 to 2010. He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher, and Artistic Director of the monthly journal The Brooklyn Rail and the publishing press Rail Editions. In 2013 he founded the Rail Curatorial Projects, which aims to curate group exhibitions that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions, most recently Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society has the Capacity to Destroy at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey (2017).
All of these facets of Bui’s work are part of a larger artistic vision—a social environment that includes his pencil-drawn portraits of various creative individuals in the arts and humanities and meditation paintings, an integral part of elaborate installations accompanied by events with collaborators from all disciplines.
Recent publications include Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail (published by David Zwirner Books, 2017), The River Rail (a free bi-annual publication focused on environmental issues, 2017), and Occupy Rail, an ongoing endeavor to encourage and support motivated individuals to create their own editorially independent Rail, in their local communities across the United States and abroad.
Bill Jensen (b. 1945 in Minneapolis, Minnesota; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) was one of the first artists to establish a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 1970s. He came into prominence with “the return to painting” of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Intuitive and visceral, Jensen’s abstractions have long been admired for their unconventional compositions and profound sense of color. Saturated, densely worked surfaces, seemingly primordial in origin, transcend any sense of the struggle that Jensen attributes to his painting process. For Jensen, a painting is successful only when the artist’s initial impulse and his material’s properties harmoniously converge; this can sometimes take several years to achieve. Defined by an amorphous, ever-changing search for resolution, Jensen’s results are ultimately determined by the act of painting itself.
Jensen’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. He is represented by Cheim & Read, New York.
Margrit Lewczuk (b. 1952 in New York, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has been exploring a nexus of iconic imagery that exudes potential healing agency as well as an emanation of light that nurtures life forms, both natural and abstract. She is the Painting Atelier Head at The New York Studio School, and has previously taught at The New School, New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island; Boston University, Massachusetts; the University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Princeton University, New Jersey; Fordham University, New York.
One person and group solo including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museo Internazionale della donna nell’Arte, Abruzzo, Italy; MoMA PS1, New York; Artist’s Space, New York; the Maier Museum, Lynchburg, Virgina; Tibor de Nagy, New York, among others. She has received numerous awards, including the Purchase Award and the Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation.
Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981 in Cincinnati, Ohio; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has recently gained critical acclaim for subtle, highly sensual oil paintings that oscillate in appearance through open-ended imagery and responsiveness to the movement of light.
Recent one-person exhibitions include Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York and A Palazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy. Group exhibitions include Ribordy Contemporary, Switzerland; Colby Museum of Art, Maine; Washington University Museum, D.C.; Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Forthcoming is a group exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2018). Recent collaborations include the contribution of album art to Planetarium, a record by Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister (June 2017). Works are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Colby Museum of Art, Maine; the Farnsworth Museum of Art, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York and A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia.
