NEW YORK, NY.- Stephen Haller Gallery announces Paper Rocks Sccissors: a group exhibition of collage and paper-based works from gallery and guest artists opened February 23rd and running through March 31st.

Each artist brings a unique and diverse practice to these works: torn, cut, bent, pierced, incised. The exhibition includes works from a multi-generational selection of artists: from the young art sensations the Oakes Twins – Ryan and Trevor, to rare early collage works from the estate of Larry Zox.

In the catalogue to Zox’s seminal Whitney Museum exhibition curator James Monte wrote that these earliest collage works are “extremely graphic and take advantage of spatial jumps alternately back into an illusionary picture plane and forward into the viewer’s space.” This is also true of the Michel Alexis pieces in the exhibition made of incised rice paper, oil paint, and mixed media on canvas.

Ryan and Trevor Oakes’ concave sculptural drawings are a fascinating exploration of perception. Their work is also currently on view in The Periphery of Perception at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as part of their EMPAC artist residency.

The main gallery features Nobu Fukui’s monumental Superman is Alive! This iconic work is meticulously hand cut with densely packed imagery suggesting both frenzy and containment. Fukui’s is a painstaking process of cutting and layering, painting and placing image upon image.

Whether it is the riot of color that is characteristic of the Fukui’s, the innovation in the sculpture/ drawings by the Oakes, the graphic quality of the Zox or Alexis, the layering of materials in the Doug and Mike Starns, the piercing in the work of Tracey Emin, the frank separation of papers in the Linda Stojak, the subtle minimalist construction of the Robert Courtright, or the nearly imperceptible layering in Johnnie Winona Ross’s chine colle – the work of these artists prompts the viewer to engage along with the artists in investigating notions of perception.