Fabulous You: New works by Sun You

Artist Statement:

My body of work, for the past thirty years, reflects on the ways that ‘seeing’ – our visual interactions with and experience of the world – are mediated by technologies. I have a longstanding and complicated relationship with visual technologies, both old and new – a relationship marked as much by excitement and attraction as skepticism and repulsion. My work asks: How do the ‘technological’ visual languages that surround us today shape what we see, and how do they compare to the experiences provided through the technologies of the past- oil painting, sculpture or photography? What do we gain and what do we lose with each new technology? How can we become more critical and skeptical of something that appears so immediate and natural: the eye, the image, and all their enhancements?

Bio:

Over the past three decades, Pedro Barbeito has exhibited internationally in fifteen solo exhibitions and participated in over ninety group exhibitions. He is one of the first proponents of integrating digital technologies into a painting matrix. Over his career he has been represented internationally by eight galleries: in NYC, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, Madrid and London. Solo exhibition venues include Basilico Fine Arts in NYC; Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston; Parra Romero Gallery in Madrid; Galerie Richard in Paris; 101/Exhibit in Los Angeles; and Charest-Weinberg Gallery in Miami. His exhibits have been reviewed in The New York Times by Roberta Smith and Ken Johnson, in Art in America by Stephen Maine, in The Village Voice by Jerry Saltz and Kim Levin, as well as in the New Yorker, Artpulse, Frieze, Art/Text, Art Nexus, Examiner.com, amongst others. His work has been written about by Barry Schwabsky, Mario Diacono, Ronald Jones, Raphael Rubinstein, Monica Ramirez-Montagut and Amy Cappellazzo amongst others.

Artist Statement:

I don’t really do artists’ statements.

Bio:

William Corwin is a sculptor and writer from New York.  He has had exhibitions in New York at The Clocktower Gallery, LaMama La Galleria, and Geary Gallery, and has shown in London, Hamburg, Beijing, and Taipei. He has organized many art exhibitions involving the painter Marguerite Louppe at universities in the United States, at Lafayette College, Albright College, and Seton Hall University. He organized the exhibition Postwar Women at The Art Students League of New York in 2019, and 9th Street Club, at Gazelli Art House in 2020, which featured many abstract expressionist painters, all women, including Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Mavis Pusey, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lee Krasner among many others. He is the author of & Model, a book about a grassroots artist-run gallery in Leeds, United Kingdom, published by Leeds Metropolitan University in 2019.  He is currently having a show of sculpture at L’église Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul in Grand-Bressac in France, and will have an exhibition at Riverhouse Contemporary in Toledo Ohio in December.  He is represented by Geary Gallery in New York.

Artist Statement:

1. Call me Visionary. Stripped of its ego and arrogance, the term denotes ‘a person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible.’ Call me that. I reclaim Visionary from the mythical genius in the name of the enthusiastic dreamer.

2. Relying on both intuition and intentional inquiry, I trace histories of movement between and across borders through my work in performance as well as objects, images, and installations. At times I employ social practice strategies, reflecting upon the struggle to maintain community that attends a transition between spaces—physical, geographic, emotional, intellectual—and alluding to the dispersal phenomenon that is part of any migration/diaspora story. 

3. I work to develop poetries of image, of function, and of interaction. 

Bio:

Néstor Armando Gil nació en La Florida, E.U. en 1971. Cursó estudios superiores en la Universidad de Carolina del Norte En Chapel Hill obteniendo una Maestría en Artes Plásticas en el Año 2009. Sus obras han sido exhibidas tanto en Los Estados Unidos como en el extranjero.

Artist Statement:

My art is an emotional and tactile response to the built environment. I am drawn to spaces of transformation, where one world is changing to the next. This includes construction sites glimpsed through hoarding fences, the remnants of colorful commercial packaging crushed underfoot or the layered density of overpainted traffic lanes and utility markings. In response to sites like these, I make work that questions appearance — what are things made of? What’s the gesture or metaphor under the surface? How can I represent this or take it with me?

Bio:

Ethan Greenbaum is a New York based artist. Selected exhibition venues include KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York, Higher Pictures, New York; New York; Marianne Boesky, New York, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Steve Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon & Alan, Miami, The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; Socrates Sculpture Park; Long Island City and Stems Gallery, Brussels. Recent projects include a solo presentation with Lyles & King and solo exhibitions at Galerie Pact, Paris and Super Dakota, Brussels.
His work has been discussed in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, ArtReview and Interview Magazine, among others. Ethan is a co-founder and editor of thehighlights.org and his writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Wax Magazine, BOMB, Paper Monument and others. He has also curated and co-curated multiple exhibitions at venues including The Suburban, Chicago; Lyles & King, New York and Super Dakota, Brussels. Greenbaum is the recipient of the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant, the Silver Art Residency, The Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donne’s Workspace Residency, LMCC’s Workspace Program, The Robert Blackburn SIP Fellowship, The Socrates EAF Fellowship, The Edward Albee Foundation Residency and The Barry Schactman Painting Prize. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.

Artist Statement:

Grounded within installation, painting and sculpture, my work demarcates a visual lexicon that reflects the cultural inheritance of Korean American experience. Situated within a Western context and entangled within cross-cultural histories, this lexicon becomes an amalgam of “cute culture”, imported cultural artifacts, generational practices, and domestic wares. By activating familial histories, media platforms, and Asian enclaves as rich sites of reference, I uncover visual connections across immigrant histories and the broader Asian diaspora.

By oscillating the work between object and image, I use installation to create a reimagined space that recontextualizes this uncovered aesthetic language and reiterates connections through arrangement. I use the palette and “flatness” of cute iconography, so that a fly swatter, stickers, and decor speak can share visual language. This references how cuteness as an aesthetic category proliferates in the daily life of the diaspora, prevalent in everything from pop culture to everyday necessities. Through recontextualizing, arranging, and reimagining, I seek to unearth the often invisible interconnections spanning from the personal to the geopolitical found within the domestic site.

Bio:

Christina Yuna Ko is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and will receive her MFA from Columbia University in 2025. Selected exhibitions include: “Currents”, SK Gallery, New York, NY; “Transformation Sequence”, Spring Break Art Fair, New York, NY; “Gathering”, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY; “Étude for Some Place in Between”, One River Gallery, Woodbury, NY; “Late Night Enterprise”, Perrotin, New York, NY; “Bathing in Public”, Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn, NY; “Night Scenes”, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY; “In Good Taste”, Dinner Gallery, New York, NY; “Internal Arrangements”, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and “Downloading Place”, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY. Her work has been featured in Apogee Journal, Artforum, FAD Magazine, FAR–NEAR, Gallery Gurls, Hyperallergic, JoySauce, Li Tang, The Fader magazine, and The Washington Post among others.    

Artist Statement:

My work is informed by nature, history, urban culture, color theory, and the physicality of acrylic paint. I use a range of symbolic imagery to explore personally and publicly relevant themes such as camp and gay culture, the beauty of nature, color’s expressive potential, the impulse to decorate, and the psychology of the creative drive. My subjects are rendered with dots of acrylic paint that define edges and activate the composition. My hand painted dots create raised textures that stand proud of the painting’s surface and declare my devotion to craft, while questioning contemporary notions of painting’s reproducibility. As a counterpoint to my labor-intensive acrylic paintings, I make ink paintings on rag paper that capture quick movement, the power of the immediate line, and nuances of touch and pressure. Subjects often include flowers that I grow myself.

Bio:

Eric Hibit (born Rochester, NY) is a visual artist based in New York City. He attended the Corcoran College of Art + Design (BFA,1998) and Yale University School of Art (MFA, 2003). In New York, he has exhibited at Morgan Lehman Gallery, Dinner Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, My Pet Ram, One River School of Art + Design, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Underdonk Gallery, Anna Kustera Gallery, and elsewhere. He has exhibited nationally at Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Wege Center for the Arts at Maharishi University in Fairfield, IA, Hexum Gallery in Montpelier, VT, The Cape Cod Museum of Art, The University of Vermont, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, and internationally in Sweden, France and Norway. His work has been covered by the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Newsweek, New York Times and New York Post. Artist residencies include Terra Foundation in Giverny, France (2003), Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts (2019) and Green Olives Arts in Tetouan, Morocco (2019). Publications include Dear Hollywood Writers, with poet Geoffrey Young (2017), Paintings and Fables with Wayne Koestenbaum, a limited edition artist’s book (2017), and Color Theory for Dummies, published by Wiley (2022).  He is currently Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects.

Artist Statement 

I tell stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. My influences represent a broad swath of interests that include abstraction, parafiction, politics, humor, feminism and art history. My multiple ethnicities give me access to explore histories of the African diaspora, the complexities of indigeneity and the legacies of colonialism. By calling into question how we understand history and the elusive nature of truth, my work reveals the subjectivity of both. Our post-truth world in which social media sites provide a platform for misinformation that has led to factual relativity. While I cannot counter the plethora of misinformation circulating the internet, I can reveal my own processes and draw attention to the labor that is often invisible from those in peripheral Communities.

Bio:

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce Sacred Geometry, a series of hand-cut photographic collages and How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a multi-channel video installation and live performances. National and international exhibitions venues include: Pompidou Centre, Malaga SP (2024); LatinX Project, NY NY (2024), RGR Gallery, CDMX (2024). Museo de la Ciudad, Cuenca, EC (2021), Photoville, The Clemente, NY NY (2021), Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX (2019), Centro de la imagen, CDMX (2018), Centro de arte contemporaneo Quito, EC (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, NY (2018), Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016)

Artist Statement:

I became fascinated with the kingdom of fungi in high school. My interest led me to a body of work earlier in my career using bracket mushroom, a hard-bodied mushroom that grows on living trees over long periods of time. The mushrooms acquire the cellulose of the tree as a building block, sometimes in the service of helping the tree (endophytic) and sometimes as a destroyer, (parasitic) attacking the tree and pulling nutrients from its host. I collected these hard bodied forms and began using them as shaped canvases and sculptures, drilling into, painting on and carving away at the forms.

Bio:

Jim Toia grew up in suburban New Jersey, and sought the woods and streams in his childhood, delighted by the discovery of salamanders, fish and any living breathing woodland creature. As an artist, he still explores these terrains, but expands his reach to places more remote and extreme such as Alaska and desert environments, He generates work by exploring worlds less familiar, fascinated by natures' inexhaustible diversity and invention, and finds ways to bring those discoveries to his audience, Toia received his BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 1984 and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NY, NY in 1993. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and the Far East and resides in the collections of the Yale Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the AT&T Collection, the Newhouse collection, the Dallas Museum of Art and Stamford University. He is the recipient of many grants and awards including a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Grant. Toia has been curating exhibitions since his early years as an artist. He teaches at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania and is the executive director of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail in Easton, PA.

Bio + Statement

B. Wurtz is an American painter and sculptor. He lives and works in New York City. Wurtz received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980. Wurtz is known for his transformations of commonplace materials into sculptures. In 2015, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to La Casa Encendida in Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.