Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whisper

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents a group exhibition featuring new and historical paintings and sculptures by artists Jonathan Baldock, Caroline Coon, Pam Glick, Hulda Guzmán, Wayne Gonzales, Channing Hansen, Holly Hendry, Ged Quinn and Yooyun Yang.

Through a variety of media, the show highlights different approaches to colour, process and the human form in relation to nature. From the humorous to the mystic, each artist has a unique interpretation based on personal memories or shared experiences.

Central to the exhibition is a monumental work by Holly Hendry, created site-specifically for her recent solo exhibition Watermarks at SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA. The piece evokes looped industrial pipes, deflated mechanical gears, and strange anatomical forms, encouraging reflection on the interconnectedness of sculpture, the human body, and the built and natural environment.

Inspired by feminism and the politics of sexual liberation, Caroline Coon’s historical works span a variety of subjects including sex workers, beachgoers, intersex people, still lives, football players and urban landscapes. All are united by the artist’s unwavering rebellion against the status quo. In Falling Sunrise (2009), Coon portrays a cascade of nude bathers, rendered in the artist’s distinctive style, using crisp-edged lines, bright colours and psychedelic detail to define the physicality of the subjects. Parallel to this exhibition, Coon’s work is featured in Women in Revolt! at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Also on view is The Beach (2021), a triptych by Wayne Gonzales, whose work is also on view in the group exhibition The Swimmer at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Inspired by the documentation of major events from the twentieth century, Gonzales’ meticulously crosshatched paintings examine the American cultural landscape through the visual language of photography. Gonzales’ painstakingly rendered paintings employ a rigorous formal structure to explore the relationship between photography and communal memory.

Other highlights in the exhibition include a series of towering ceramic sculptures by Jonathan Baldock; a large-scale painting by Ged Quinn that hovers between figuration and abstraction; a lush landscape triptych by Hulda Guzmán; and marquee works by Pam Glick, Channing Hansen and Yooyun Yang.