NEW YORK, NY.- Hirschl & Adler Modern opened TAKE FIVE. The group show welcomes Jeanne Duval, F. Scott Hess, David Ligare, Jeffrey Ripple, and Marc Trujillo into the gallery’s stable of contemporary representational painters. After several successful years showing in San Francisco with Michael Hackett and Tracy Freedman, these five artists are making their New York debut at Hirschl & Adler Modern. More than 30 still lifes, interiors, urban landscapes, and figurative works are on view.
Jeanne Duval fuses modern sensibilities with those of Italian Renaissance and Spanish Baroque painting in her sumptuous still lifes. Her rigorous paintings featuring dramatically lit arrangements of solid fruit forms and hollow vessels are about contrasts and juxtapositions–of color and scale, light and shadow, past and present, the real and the illusory–resulting in visual feasts that tease the senses while demanding further contemplation.
F. Scott Hess is a narrative realist painter whose psychologically charged and provocative subject matter focuses on mankind’s struggle to give life meaning. Hess employs the formalism of the old masters to bring to life complex narratives laden with symbolic, literary, and art historical references. His works explore and question contemporary themes of popular culture as well as more existential questions of life, including identity, alienation, loss, sex, family, futility, and final judgment.
David Ligare, a contemporary classicist, paints still-lifes, landscapes, and figures informed by the objects and philosophies of Greco-Roman antiquity. This exhibition features a series of harmonious, neo-classical still lifes based on Roman first-fruit offerings. These “aparchai” or “gift of thanks” paintings present symbolic objects of bowls of fruit, flowers, and pottery in stage-like settings bathed in the artist’s signature golden light.
Jeffrey Ripple paints complex still life compositions in oil on paper which capture the exquisite beauty, mystery, and cycles of the natural world. Inspired by 17th-century Spanish painting and Asian art, Ripple sets his minutely observed and meticulously crafted flowers, vases, fruits, plants, and animals against spaceless, textured, greenish-gold grounds. The resulting compositions transcend traditional botanical illustration and reveal something more spiritual and meditative.
Marc Trujillo’s urban landscapes encourage us to slow down and closely examine what the artist refers to as “North American purgatory”, the “everyday in-between spaces” such as shopping malls, gas stations, chain restaurants, and movie theaters. Though based on direct observation, Trujillo’s paintings are rigorously composed synthetic recreations, evidencing his consummate skill and his appreciation and awareness of paintings and painters of the past.
