New Paintings By Brittney Leeanne Williams @ Alexander Berggruen in New York

 
 

The Arch Is A Portal Is A Belly Is A Back marks Brittney Leeanne Williams’ first solo exhibition with Alexander Berggruen. The new paintings and works on paper by Brittney Leeanne Williams take influence from desertscapes in Victorville, a city northeast of Los Angeles where Williams spent part of her childhood. Williams transforms these Southern Californian landscapes into “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties.”

The red of many of Williams’s figures might connote a rawness, a tenderness, and an emotional vulnerability. As Legacy Russell wrote: “A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and a passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.” (1) Williams’s female forms serve as conduits to viewing a dimension of Williams’s spirit. In her own words: “Her back becomes the keystone. She holds up what is above, fastening herself to what’s below, to make room so that something or someone may pass through.”
(1) Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, London, New York, 2020, pp. 83-84, 101

The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back is on view through April 14 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York

Danny Fox's The Sweet and Burning Hills @ Alexander Berggruen In New York

Danny Fox’s new paintings at Alexander Berggruen capture the conflicting spirit of the Hollywood Hills through boldly-rendered expressive portraiture, mystical elements, and allusions to smoke and fire. Fox blends domestic imagery with influences from his natural surroundings to create eerily striking articulations of the human psyche. In the show’s namesake 2019 painting The Sweet and Burning Hills, a figure lets a mask hang below her chin to reveal her face, seemingly indifferent to the fire-teeming background. The ghost-like transparent outline of her body suggests her transience within the burning environment, or perhaps she exists as a distant memory. As the figure is impermanent and atemporal, so too is the landscape immortalized in painting while burning to ash. photographs by Dario Lasagni

The Sweet and Burning Hills is on view by appointment through February 26 @ Alexander Berggruen 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3