Swimming in October: 251 West 19th Street

NEW YORK – Ethan Cohen Gallery is proud to announce Swimming in October, a dynamic group exhibition that showcases a compelling mix of paintings and sculptures by both emerging and established contemporary artists from around the world. The exhibition features work by Aboudia, Yigal Ozeri, Thomas Deininger, Emil Alzamora, Ray Smith, Katinka Huang, Olasunkanmi Akomolehin, and Paul Paiement.

Swimming in October offers a captivating look into these artists’ focus on contemporary realism, where figuration, narrative and elements of abstraction are utilized to push the boundaries of realism through both painterly and sculptural techniques, with the human spirit in mind. From Aboudia’s street-art-inspired, layered urban compositions, bursting with raw intensity to Yigal Ozeri’s hyper-realistic portraits that delve into capturing essence and intimacy, the exhibition presents a broad spectrum of artistic approaches to realism. The sculptural works, including Emil Alzamora’s abstracted human forms and Thomas Deininger’s environmentally conscious assemblages, add depth to this conversation, challenging perceptions of reality and materiality. Each artist contributes a unique perspective on themes of identity, perception, and the human condition, merging academic techniques with bold innovation.

Aboudia

Born in 1983, Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Aboudia's multi-layered paintings offer simultaneity of images and meanings that conduct a continuous discourse with each other and with the viewer. In any glance the eye takes in one or other layer, which is soon overcome by the next. We are aware of the vivid, brutal pageant of contemporary Africa weaving before us like a fabric of consciousness - soldiers, skulls, African fetishes, flashes of street life - expressed with vitality. The surfaces deploy fragments, cuttings, from bits of comic strips, magazine ads, newspaper images, set into the paintings' overall compositions so as to suggest current events cohering through the imagination into a troubled and troubling vision.

In the end though, the artist's gift of cohesion transforms chaos into vitality, painful events to esthetic redemption, so one is able to see the whole as a changeable tide forever renewing hope.

Yigal Ozeri

Born in 1958, Israel

Yigal Ozeri is a hyper realist painter known for his large - scale cinematic portraits and street scenes.  Known best for his portraits of distinctive young women in rich prodigious landscapes, with tinges of pre - Raphaelite aesthetics, Ozeri brings an ethereal and uninhibited sensibility to his paintings. His portraits denote art historical foundations in romanticism, while also offering contemporary notions of sensual femininity. Rooted in Carl Jung's concept of anima, Ozeri's depictions of a revitalized connectivity to nature prompt a confrontation of subconscious effeminate identity and reinstate the beauty of innocent authentic experience. His photorealistic oil paintings convey the spirit of his subjects, giving way to a seductive power. As a result, the viewer is compelled to gaze into the allegorical domain between reality and fantasy.

Thomas Deininger

Born in 1970, Boston, MA

Thomas Deininger is a Rhode Island based artist whose work combines environmental concerns with an innovative approach to image making. His found object assemblages are constructed from non-recyclable, non-biodegradable materials that pile up in our nation’s landfills. Works like this provide a thoughtful response to mass consumerism. He asks the viewer to reconsider the potential for transcendence of the mundane. His works are in many private and public collections throughout the world.

In his early twenties, he traveled the world for several years exploring Europe, Central America, and the South Pacific. It was during these explorations that Deininger developed thoughts on American consumerism as he witnessed the frugal resourcefulness of non-industrial cultures and the problems of waste blanketing the shores of distant islands. It was after a trip to the Nantucket landfill that he came up with the idea of making realist assemblages out of found materials. His detritus mosaics are a response to the ways in which mass-produced consumer cultures threaten our natural environment. They also raise questions about value, perspective, and our ability to make meaningful associations and develop thoughtful responses in a media-driven world of endless streams of materials and data.

Emil Alzamora
Born in Lima, Peru, 1975

Emil Alzamora sculpts the human form, distilling it to its purest elements with an almost refined essence. These emotionally charged works, elongated and lacking identifiable human features like eyes, facial expressions, and hair, exist in a realm that is simultaneously anonymous and universally representative. They embody a fusion of modernist and surreal aesthetics while still capturing the zeitgeist of the moment.

Ray Smith (American, b.1959)

Born in Brownsville, TX, and raised in Central Mexico.

Ray Smith emerged in the 1980s, and continues to produce exuberant paintings and sculptures characterized by an inimitable style and subject matter that reflect his bi-cultural American and Mexican heritage. Contorted and morphed figures recur throughout his work, in a hybrid that draws from his early studies of fresco painting with traditional practitioners in Mexico, and an indebtedness to Picasso, the Surrealists, and the politically daring Mexican muralists. Through these varied beings, Smith reflects upon the complexities and absurdities of society, family, politics, culture, war, and the human condition itself, framed by birth and death.

Katinka Huang

Born in 1998, Shanghai, China

Raised in a female centric environment, Katinka Huang has always been fascinated by the enigma and depth of the female psyche. Huang’s upbringing influenced her to tell stories with the female body. Elements of the female form are deconstructed and juxtaposed to build fresh narratives around womanhood. These accounts are rooted from moments of dissociation, where Huang depart from reality and enter into a space of play. Within the canvas, Huang liberates the female identity to embody crudeness, childlike innocence, fury and profound sadness— while their bodies undergo a metamorphosis, fragmenting, dissolving, or emerging anew. Huang’s dissociative bouts are a temporary escape from the reality of womanhood, it allows her to reimagine femininity in all its contradictions.

Paul Paiement

Born in 1966, Minneapolis, MN

Paul Paiement is an American artist based in Long Beach, CA whose paintings and sculptures focus on the impact of humankind and the built environment on the natural world. His detailed, painterly landscapes are overlaid with angular, airbrushed Plexiglass shapes, indicating the disruption of man on nature. Paiement both contrasts and integrates "the ‘human made’ synthetic elements of ‘culture’ with the natural world." His work is often referred to term of Romanticism, as he attempts to reconcile the effects of man's nature upon Nature.

Olasunkanmi Akomolehin 

Born in 1995, Lagos, Nigeria

Olasunkanmi Akomolehin’s body of work “People are becoming memories while still alive (More than a flower series)” illuminates the idea that memories are not only created upon the passing of a person. The series highlights how memory is an integral part of an individual’s life and is essential for learning and preserving a sense of self. Akomolehin’s vibrant portraits combine a dynamic use of varying pattern with an unmistakably command of compositional structure in which his figures both simultaneously emerge and dissolve. However it is Akomolehin’s ability to delft address of love and romance through the affect of his sitters which transcends any continental distinction in his work.

ABOUT ETHAN COHEN GALLERY

From the very beginning, Ethan Cohen Gallery has represented a pioneering blend of both emerging and internationally renowned artists. Many of the emerging artists have now become household names. Mr. Cohen has steered the gallery to occupy a distinct place in contemporary art as a center of innovation across disciplines and countries. Today Ethan Cohen Gallery has three gallery locations, two in Chelsea in the heart of New York City and the other in Beacon, New York.

Ethan Cohen first founded his gallery in 1987 as Art Waves/Ethan Cohen in SoHo, New York. A groundbreaker in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Ethan Cohen was the first gallerist to present the Chinese Avant-Garde of the 1980s to the United States. Ethan Cohen Gallery today represents a diverse global mix of contemporary and post-war contemporary art, specializing in contemporary Asian art and contemporary African art.

Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 6pm.

Press Contacts:

Dan Schwartz

danschwar@gmail.com

Lara Kamhi

lara@ecfa.com

Isaac Aden

isaac@ecfa.com