Opening Reception [08/04/23]

Join us for Sowa First Friday to celebrate the Opening Reception of our current exhibition "Abstractionism" featuring six artists, Eve Aschheim, Aristotle Forrester, Nygel Jones, Matthew Murphy, Oriane Stender and Jessica Tawczynski.

Nygel Jones, Matthew Murphy, Oriane Stender and Jessica Tawczynski will be present.

Press Release:

LaiSun Keane is pleased to present Abstractionism, a group exhibition featuring artists Eve Aschheim, Aristotle Forrester, Nygel Jones, Matthew Murphy, Oriane Stender and Jessica Tawczynski, from July 21 to August 27, 2023.

This is a thoughtfully curated exhibition consisting of six artists who create non-representational art. The primary objective of this exhibition is to augment the discourse on the enduring allure of abstract art. The exhibition showcases diverse art forms, including tapestry, shaped canvas, oil painting, minimalist drawing, and paper collage. Beyond the delineation of shapes, colors, and compositions, we invite viewers to engage in the activity of eliciting personal interpretations of the artworks. Viewers are encouraged to contemplate the meaning, ask thought-provoking questions, as well as tap into their imagination to achieve a transcendental understanding of the works. In doing so, they can surpass the limits of mere didactics and arrive at an alternative realm of reality, unto new insights and perspectives.

Eve Aschheim is a highly regarded abstract artist with decades of exhibitions, including solo exhibits at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in NYC and Galerie Inga Kondeyne in Berlin. She has received grants from prestigious organizations like the Guggenheim, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work is included in numerous public collections such as MoMa, The MET, Harvard Museum and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin just to name a few. Aschheim lives and works in New York City and is a full-time faculty member at Princeton University.

Aristotle Forrester is an abstract expressionist born on the South Side of Chicago, raised in Hyde Park, Boston and is currently based in New York. He creates large-scale landscape and figure-inspired oil paintings. He received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016, and is currently a MFA candidate and Neiman Fellow at Columbia University. He was selected as the Visual Installation Artist at the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum in New York City in 2022.

Nygel Jones is a Boston based artist working with shaped canvas. Jones creates uniquely shaped wooden panels painted in a pop art style inspired by industrial design. He uses power tools to construct each piece and compares the cut pieces to different puzzles that come together to form a unique composition. He received his BFA from Montserrat College of Art.

Matthew Murphy is also a Boston based artist working with shaped canvas. Murphy's process involves creating custom-made stretcher bars, over which he stretches the canvas to achieve the desired shape and dimensions. He has shown at Mass Art, Western CT State University, the University of Arkansas and New Bedford Museum of Art. He has a BFA from Mass College of Art in Boston and an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. Most recently he has curated a show at Boston University titled Field Visions. He has been artist in residence at Siena Art Institute in Italy and a forthcoming residency at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Ireland.

Oriane Stender is a time intensive, ancient technique artist and maker who was born in San Francisco and based in Brooklyn, New York. Her pieces of hand-dyed threads and woven tapestries evoke the timeless tradition of women's craftsmanship found across many cultures. After receiving her education from the San Francisco Art

Institute and UC Berkeley, Oriane has exhibited her geometric abstraction tapestry paintings nationally and internationally.

Jessica Tawczynski is a Boston based multidisciplinary 2D artist known for her wild paper-based works that incorporate collage, accumulation of found materials and map-making to create anthropomorphic caricatures of places and landscapes. Her works explore various stages of emotional intelligence and reference the sublime components of an environment under constant transformation, reflecting upon the climate crisis, and her own feminine identity. She received her BFA from University of Massachusetts, Lowell and MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. She is also the founder of Inside Voices Art and has participated in international residencies and exhibitions.

Abstractionism will be on display at the gallery from July 21st to August 27th, 2023. The gallery will host an Opening Reception is on First Friday, August 4th from 5pm to 8pm.

Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, please visit the gallery's website or contact us at [email protected].

Opening Reception

Share this event

Sponsored events

Men, Come Inside of Me