2025

2024

Steve Joy

This exhibition centers around a series of works resulting in part from Joy’s visits to Cistercian abbeys in the south of France during Covid. The floor plans of these medieval structures are registered as geometric elements that float against thinly painted passages of atmospheric color. Bordered by Joy’s signature use of stacked rectangular motifs in oil or metal leaf, the mixed media canvases display alternating currents of luminosity and density, transparency and opacity characteristic of his oeuvre.

Undergirding Joy’s aesthetic are his reflections on his more immediate forebears in the development of 20 th-century abstraction, a particular chapter in art he has termed “American Sublime.” Traces of Brice Marden’s calligraphic gestures and approach to color and Agnes Martin’s delicate gridwork can be found within Joy’s own language of abstraction. The works here are both homages and personal ruminations on the passage of time. Additionally, the show includes paintings from Joy’s ongoing Icon series titled after the labyrinthine short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, a favorite of the artist. They demonstrate Joy’s multifaceted approach to synthesizing art, history and mythology.

Catherine Ferguson

Ferguson is a sculptor and installation artist who has continually challenged herself to create new and distinctive bodies of work. Her painted steel public sculptures with their totemic figures are recognized throughout the region. Yet over time, Ferguson has worked in glass, bronze, steel, willow, rock, light, sound and found materials, as well as created series of drawings, prints and photographs.

Since 2008, Ferguson has returned frequently to using wire as a sculptural medium, embracing its lightness, malleability and informality. Each work begins as a kind of weaving—a loose grid of lines and knots formed from the wire filaments. Hung on the wall, these relief structures engage the play of silhouette and shadow, further defining space and form. In these new works, Ferguson has also tightened her constellation of lines and thickened the knots, emphasizing density of form. Color is also introduced as a new element through her use of anodized aluminum wire. Further, the complex networks within each sculpture underscores larger systems of connection, whether internal or external, biological or cosmic.

Alicia Sancho Scherich

Gravitating toward the communication of complex subjects in visual form, Sancho Scherich began in 1988 to create the conceptual program for the large panels that would speak to such rangy topics as peace and disruption on earth, science and technology, and the arts. The goal, for the artist, was to make a depiction of the “creative and destructive nature of Man.” Each panel has an overarching theme, such as “Universal Love,” the first in this suite inspired by Nobel Prize winner and humanitarian Mother Teresa. “Sunset on Wildlife” and “No More in My Name” address man’s inhumanity to both creatures and people, while “Breaking with Oppression” and “Love Victorious” reveal hope and redemption for society. Realistically and vividly rendered, each canvas features an array of portraits and other figurative symbols that expand on Sancho Scherich’s imaginative visual allegories.

Larry Roots

Roots’ recent paintings provide a unique catalogue of his approach to working with acrylics. The
artworks coalesce a multiplicity of crosscurrents into each composition: they are at once painterly and restrained, opaque and translucent, freeform and gridded, raw and delicate. Roots’ abstractions here are improvisational and lyrical, pushing and pulling the eye across their atmospheric surfaces and into depths of color, shape and line. Context is also provided for the evolution of Roots’ style with a selection of older personal favorites, paintings that encapsulate his forays into merging calligraphy with gestural abstraction.

Also new in this exhibition are Roots’ sculptural reliefs. These provide insight to the artist’s approach to pictorial space as inherently dimensional, creating illusions of deep perspective within the confined space of a diorama. As if designing art installations in miniature, Roots populates these architectural spaces with a variety of objects in miniature, many of them repurposed from his maquettes and “boneyard of ideas” for sculptures over the years.

Katherine Bello

An experimental colorist and expressive mark-maker, Bello approaches each canvas as a fresh odyssey. Using acrylic paint or a mix of media, she combines thinly veiled washes with highly textured painterliness. Color, often lush and vibrant, adds vitality. Bello balances opposing forces of form and void, sifting through the impulses of memory and intuition, weaving lightness and darkness into a harmony that reveals her process, at once spontaneous and intentional.

“My paintings are visually abstract,” said Bello. “They come from a place of unknowing. I never know what will happen when I begin. It’s a journey. I began painting this way later in life, so I have a rich history of memory to pull from. I don’t have a memory for details – but I remember colors, places, sounds, movement, emotions, connections. There may be a current event or something I’m resonating with at the moment that sparks a new idea, but these fragments from the past continually inspire my paintings and what is most important to me.”

2023

Gerhard Kassner

From 2003-2019, Kassner was the official photographer of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, known as the Berlinale. This festival, now in its 74 th year, ranks among the top three European forums, along with the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals, and is the largest based on attendance. At the Berlinale, Kassner’s role was to make portraits of the participating actors, directors, jurors, producers and other film business dignitaries who streamed through his small backstage studio at the main venue. Despite having 3-5 minutes to engage with each sitter and only moments more to select the final image to be printed, Kassner achieved an unparalleled directness and intimacy in every portrait.

Of the more than 2,000 portraits Kassner created during his Berlinale tenure, 67 are presented in this exhibition. It features many of Kassner’s imposing large-format prints, capturing the personalities of some of film’s biggest celebrities, ranging from veteran actors Jack Nicholson and Helen Mirren, to box office heavyweights Nicole Kidman and George Clooney, to such fast-rising stars as Timothée Chalamet. Cast montages, smaller individual portraits of actors and film directors are included, as are several sequential portraits that illustrate the nature of the photo shoot and the editorial choices Kassner made with each sitting.

Humberto Chavez Mayol

Josh Powell

A visionary storyteller, Powell weaves together densely layered and textured images from printed materials, drawing and painting, a manner of building an image that is analogous to the fragmented societal narrative he creates. Building on past work that has touched on skeptical views of the industrial-military complex, Powell has fashioned dystopian landscapes borne of questioning: What does the world look like when there are no borders, states or countries? Amidst the chaos, where might order and beauty be found? Can the familiar be reconstituted from destruction? Are we the watchers or the watched?

Powell’s speculative fictions are linked to his strong interest in the rules of surrealism: juxtaposition, transformation and dislocation. Additionally, his ongoing fascinations with folklore and pop culture are blended into powerful compositions resonating at the busy intersection of past and future, humor and gravity, hope and fear.

Mario Wyrwinski

Jens Pepper

Joseph Broghammer

Evets is the latest in Broghammer’s series of works featuring intersections, both observed and imagined, between human and animal subjects. Whether focusing on birds or barnyard animals, the artist begins with carefully observed, realistically rendered specimens. Broghammer then embellishes his subjects with layers of implied narrative, adding atmospheric backgrounds and an array of symbols and ciphers that take the works well beyond illustration toward the realm of fabulism.

Here, Broghammer has returned to the topic of hummingbirds, but has assertively disrupted their dazzling beauty with exaggerated features, human organs and other fantastic hybridizations. Their sharp, pointed beaks become winding, black pavements along which traverse tiny, silhouetted figures. They inhabit a sea of morphing shape and color that contains a truly surreal carnival of trappings. Broghammer’s world of feathered creatures is characteristically and gloriously enigmatic, filled with his idiosyncratic psychodramas, conveying a wondrously singular story.

Christian Rothmann

Rothmann is known as a bold colorist, favoring bright, saturated hues that both enliven his compositions and express a joie de vivre that percolates through his art. In this new body of work, focused on interpreting mountain landscapes, Rothmann’s vibrantly toned color blocks help define pictorial space, while gestural strokes suggest movement as well as the outlines of peaks and outcroppings. Reflecting his own feeling of a romantic sublime, the paintings abstract the shared sensations of such topography, whether feeling small before nature, experiencing its vertiginous heights, stirring memoires of past travels or recalling imagery from cinema.

A spirit of improvisation, of theme and variation informs Rothmann’s oil paintings and mixed media ink drawings. Many of his smaller landscapes are made during his travels, while others take form in his Berlin studio or were made in Omaha prior to this exhibition. His use of ink here is inspired particularly by Japanese art and practice of sumi-e ink landscape painting, conveying a sense of the hilly countryside with an elegant economy of monochromatic gesture.

2022

Jeff Sedrel

As with his previous compositions drawing upon a range of familiar symbols, animal forms and consumer products, Sedrel aims here for an equilibrium between the inevitable metaphors and conventions of still life painting and his desire to communicate in the artistic language of present tense. Interested in the connection between Impressionism and the Industrial Age, Sedrel is also intrigued by parallels with the emergence of artificial intelligence technology as a method of producing art through algorithms and how, as the 21 st century wears on, it might inform traditional studio practice.

The resulting botanical compositions are Sedrel’s own invention. Inspired by the bouquets and floral sprays at work and home, he translates that beauty into vivid spatial arrangements of form and color. Working in a mix of media—ink, acrylics, marker—on either canvas or paper, Sedrel compresses space, filling it with an explosion of bright, direct gestures that speak to natural abundance and the pleasures of artmaking unfettered by standard iconography or didactic intent. “Current times can be outright overwhelming,” said Sedrel, “and perhaps at the end of the day, I just wanted to paint flowers.”

Animals (group exhibition)