Howard’s is excited to present a three person show with Genesis Belanger, Julie Curtiss, and Anthony Iacono. The opening will be on Saturday, January 19th, from 4-6 pm. The show will run until March 2nd.
The three New York based artists work in different media, and represent a generational interest in pictures, surrealism, and noir sexuality. With distinct voices, they share an affinity for French 19th Century painting, Pop Art, Cinema, and the Chicago Imagists. Each transforms everyday experience and familiar iconography into something far more mysterious. Unexpected cropping and fragmentation shift our perspective, and finely tuned spatial relationships heighten a rich psychological subtext.
Genesis Belanger crafts porcelain and stoneware ceramics, pigmented with pastel color. Her objects function like a surrealist interpretation of 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings, where seemingly mundane objects are given new life and meaning. As if plucked from a dream, items like an ice cream sunday, feel entirely unfamiliar. They exist in their own realm- slow, oddly uniform in consistency, melting, merging, soft. Allusions to body parts and movement intensify the sense of uncanny.
Julie Curtiss’ paintings are funny, strange, and disquieting. Anonymous women with hidden faces exude power and mystery in her world. With deliberate cropping and taut juxtaposition, we are given access to intimate, unsettling spaces. The artifice of gender roles is hinted at, and twisted. Details like braided hair, sexy attire, and brightly colored nails are given pronounced attention. Classical beauty is subsumed by an aesthetic much darker, more sexual, and charged.
Anthony Iacono makes graphic collages from hand-cut and painted shapes. Often against dark, cool backgrounds, he crops clothed and semi-nude queer figures. Included in this show are ink collages, cut from magenta washes on paper. We see portions of torsos, backsides, busts, and feet. With delicate attention to geometry, compositional arrangement, and the picture plane, Iacono creates methodical visual rhythms akin to Hockney and Piero della Francesca. His isolated figures often perform suggestively with familiar objects, eliciting a humorous eroticism. He twists the ordinary, hinting at bodily pain, pleasure, and fetish.
Genesis Belanger received a BFA from Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Hunter. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include a two person show with Emily Mae Smith at Perrotin, New York, and solo exhibition at Mrs. Gallery, New York. She has forthcoming solo shows at the New Museum, NY; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; and Galerie Rodolph Janssen, Brussels. Group exhibitions include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Reyes Projects, Pioneer Works, and Invisible Exports Gallery. She is the recipient of the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and was a Pioneer Works Fellow in 2017. Her work has recently been featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, ArtForum, Time Out NY, and many others.
Julie Curtiss was born in Paris and now lives and works in Brooklyn. She received an MFA and a BA from Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France. She has had solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA and 106 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She has a forthcoming solo show with Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at T293, Rome, Italy; White Cube, London, UK; Regina Rex, New York, NY; and Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY. Curtiss is currently a Fellow of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in NY; was the recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship through the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012; has participated in the Saltonstall Arts Colony Residency Program, Saltonstall, NY (2017); and the Contemporary Art Center At Woodside Residency Program, NY (2012). Her work has been featured in Elephant Magazine, the Times, New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Boston Globe, among others.
Anthony Iacono was born in Nyack, New York and currently lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and was a resident artist at LMCC Workspace in 2018. Iacono has had solo exhibitions at Marinaro Gallery, New York, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York; and has a forthcoming show with the Approach, London. His work has been included in group shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, 106 Green, and Rockaway Topless. In 2017 he was a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award. He will be a resident at the Museum of Arts and Design's studio residency program in Spring 2019. His work has been featured in Artforum, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and New American Paintings.