AB NY Gallery in East Hampton, NY has the exhibition Showings in Four Dimensions a group curation featuring Elise Ansel, Kyle Hittmeier and Darius Yektai until July 14th.
The three artists have blurred the line between traditional two-dimensional art and three-dimensional sculpture, enhancing their visions with awareness of the historical fourth dimension of time.
Implicit in the works of Elise Ansel and Darius Yektai is the acknowledgement that art does not exist in a vacuum, that it is not only dialogue between artist and viewer but between past and present. “Originality” is really a misnomer when it comes to the artistic process, since the artist’s vision is only realized through vocabulary derived from medium and technique that has evolved through time. Ansel and Yektai pay tribute to their predecessors not by imitation but by distilling the essential perspective that can only be gleaned through the passage of time. Or as we say, everything old is new again, or as Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Elise Ansel (b. 1961) was born and raised in New York City. She lives and works in Portland, Maine. Ansel received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. After working in the film industry, she went on to pursue her MFA at Southern Methodist University. Her education informs her practice in her interpretation of art history to paint in a unique visual vocabulary which is gestural, abstract and conceptual. With this new series of work, the sculptural “Celestial” paintings, the viewer is rewarded with the energetic movement in Ansel’s application of paint and understanding of art history to continue the conversation of Old Master paintings which she flawlessly translates from a feminine perspective onto the surface of linen canvas.
Ansel has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences.
Darius Yektai (b. 1973) is an artist living and working in New York City and Sag Harbor, NY. Darius has received several awards at the Guild Hall Museum Members Show for painting and sculpture. He has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York City, Europe, and the Hamptons, including “Yektai” in 2017 with his father, renowned painter Manoucher Yektai, and his brother, Nico Yektai, at Guild Hall Museum. His solo exhibition at “Darklight” (2020) at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs, NY and featured in The New York Times for “The Drive-By Art Show” (2020) organized during the early days of isolation on the East End of Long Island. Darius studied Art History at the American University in Paris, he currently lives and works in Sag Harbor and New York City.
AB NY Gallery is thrilled to be showing two large paintings from various bodies of work including an important piece from his Art History Series, Waiting For Death Or Slavery: After Delacroix, 2022.
“Ultimately, in my studio, I push painting towards sculpture and sculpture towards painting. So in these works, where the resin is highly reflective and interlaced between layers of thick oil paint, they are speaking about material and process, and asking you to walk around them in order to fully understand them — like sculpture does.” – Darius Yektai
Kyle Hittmeier (b. 1983) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his MFA in 2014 in painting and continues to teach and inspire the next generation of artists in the RISD Painting Department and in the Art Department at Lehman College.
During a visit to the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City, AB NY Gallery director Sarah Scribner became familiar with his painting series, ‘Flora of the Cayman Islands’, which appropriates its title from the renowned nature series George R. Proctor flora field guides, and which aestheticizes and builds a design language for hidden tax haven empires. His multi-media studio practice includes a series of NFT’s found on Foundation App. Hittmeier uses an algorithm to generate a solution to the X,Y & Z axis composition on his canvas which he paints by hand. Within the world of Web3 this is known as generative art which has existed since the 1960’s. Digitally, the discussion of the output is to evolve from the concept of three dimensions to a four-dimensional space which includes time. With the canvas as medium, the viewer can understand how Hittmeier’s algorithm defines the intersection of this unique interaction and moment in art history.
These paintings juxtapose tourist images of the Caymans against a rendered network of Post-It note compositions. Post-It notes are simple, utilitarian objects that can hold everything from the mundane doodle to the ultra-secret password. They are the few remaining, physical objects in a digitally evolved, financial world. Botanical motifs have been used by civilizations throughout history as a means to symbolize their wealth and prosperity. Prominent in the surfaces of these notes are hints of flora fragments — attempts of tax-haven design that compare Cayman indigenous plant phytotomies with various banking and information structures.
For more information or to arrange a private viewing of this installation, which will be on view until July 14, please contact the gallery.
