AT HOME
Kate Teale
and
David Henderson
new work 2020-2021
May 1through June 12, 2021
Kate Teale. “At Home 2020”, 2020, oil and acrylic on board, 12”x16”
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Over the last year, home has assumed new prominence in our lives: safe haven, trap, portal to other worlds of work or diversion. David Henderson and Kate Teale will be showing paintings and sculptures in a dialogue eerily reflective of this anxious period. Henderson is known for large-scale architectural installations, but these recent works are scaled for the domestic setting of John Molloy’s town house gallery. Teale’s work takes “home”, specifically the house, as theme.
Although very different artists at first glance, the more they worked on the show the more affinities became apparent. Henderson is an abstract sculptor fascinated with geometry; Teale, a figurative painter balancing minimalism with psychological/narrative content. For both, lightness is simultaneously subject matter and material: Teale allows the light of the page to shine through translucent layers of darkening paint, and Henderson makes highly volumetric pieces that are nevertheless light enough to be held with two fingers, some so carved away the material becomes translucent. |
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Some affinities are visual – the Baroque twisting bed sheets of Teale’s “Tumult” and the accompanying restless-feeling watercolor studies, play well with the arabesques of Henderson’s “Birdflight” series, and the inherent linear patterning produced by the material (plywood) and the method of their construction. Teale makes graphite drawings (often also on architectural scale) and gave Henderson some graphite dust, which he used to make the dark pewter-like finish for “Firebird 3 & 4”. (These pieces were made in the summer of 2020 when wildfires torched California.)
Talking about his most recent work, Henderson says: “These pieces are what it has felt like to live through this last year.” These are tense shapes, graceful, but tightly wound, tightly constructed; the helical core is strong and clear, but the material is pushed to its limits of thinness as the forms spin outward, and the edges cannot hold. Teale’s most recent “At Home 2020-21” paintings take the “solid” structure of a house, but show it also pushed past its limits and near breaking point – houses float or appear like oddly irradiated shells. Her earlier images of night windows look less unambiguously calm in the context of a year of lock down, climate crisis and political upheaval. |
David Henderson, “Firebird 4”, 2020, plywood and graphite, 30" x 11" x 8"
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Kate Teale, “At Home, January 2021”, 2021. Acrylic on mulberry paper over canvas on board, 18”x24”
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David Henderson, "Birdflight 2", 202o, plywood, beeswax, 26 x 11 X 8"
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David Henderson, "Birdflight 6", 2021, plywood, epoxy, 24 x 10 x 9"
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Kate Teale, “Tumult 2021", Oil on mulberry paper over canvas on board, 30 x 60”
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KATE TEALE - Bio
Kate Teale has shown at Studio10, Bushwick in 2013, '16 and '19. She was born in Hampshire, England, received her MA from Oxford University, England; her Art Diploma from City and Guilds of London Art School; and her MFA from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y. A recent solo survey show was accompanied by the catalog “The Housed". Group shows include Monya Rowe Gallery; Gallery Ho and Jim Kempner Gallery, in Chelsea NYC. Group shows at Brooklyn galleries include The Boiler; Bushwick Basel with Valentine Gallery; Storefront; Sideshow and Schema Projects. Her work can be seen at Pierogi Gallery flat files, Brooklyn and at Studio10, Bushwick. Kate is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Development Grant; a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and a Winston Churchill Travel Award. She teaches part-time at Parsons School of Design, and has also taught at Yale School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and Portsmouth University in the UK. |
Kate Teale, 7. “Corner Clinton”, 2017, Oil and acrylic on mulberry paper over canvas on board, 18”x24”
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DAVID HENDERSON - Bio
David Henderson studied sculpture with William Tucker, George Sugarman, and Vito Acconci. M.F.A. Columbia 1981, B.A. Bard College 1978. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions at Knoedler Gallery, Smack Mellon, Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, KFCA, Studio10 in New York City; and at William Siegal Gallery in Santa Fe. He has been in numerous national and international shows, recently at the German Musems ZKM, Karlsruhe, and Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg. His large, modular installation, "A Brief History of Aviation", has been exhibited at seven venues from Boston Massachusetts to Auburn Alabama, and has been featured in art and design blogs and magazines around the world. He has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Yorker, and twice in Sculpture Magazine. |
David Henderson, "Birdflight 1", 2020, plywood, beeswax, 30 x 11 x 9"
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David Henderson, "Birdflight 5", 2021, plywood, epoxy, 24 x 16 x 11
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David Henderson, "Firebird 2", 2020, plywood, beeswax, 27 x 14 x 12"
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Kate Teale, 3. “Bay Atlantic” 2018, Oil and acrylic on mulberry paper over canvas on board, 24”x36”
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Kate Teale, “Night Window LIC”, 2020, Acrylic on mulberry paper over canvas on board, 16 x 12”
