Independent New York

Sixth Floor


Mar 6 - Mar 8, 2020

Press release for exhibition Sixth Floor

Independent New York
March 6 – 8, 2020

P·P·O·W is pleased to present contemporary works by Aaron Gilbert, Clementine Keith-Roach, Elizabeth Glaessner, Judith Linhares, and Katharine Kuharic. Ceramic sculptures by Annabeth Rosen will be presented by OBJECT & THING.

In quietly charged, often domestic scenes, Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979) unearths the complex emotional terrain in the presence of societal crisis. Collapsing time with influences ranging from Early Renaissance painters such as Fra Angelico and magical realists such as Frida Kahlo, to Persian and Indian miniature painting, Gilbert creates deeply personal, poetic, and often political paintings that convey a complex contemporary experience. Gilbert’s meticulously worked and reworked compositions are set against a backdrop of empirically American wreckage and unbridled technological acceleration. Distilling meaning and love amid an age of mass incarceration and unchecked surveillance, Gilbert offers us one vision of the world in order to usher in the possibility of new ones. Gilbert earned his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been exhibited at Lyles and King, Lulu, and Deitch Projects, and galleries internationally. His work is currently in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In a cross-generational exhibition, P·P·O·W will present new works by Aaron Gilbert in conversation with Martin Wong’s paintings in the fall of 2020.

Flowing from figuration to abstraction, Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984) takes elements from traditional history painting and re-contextualizes them within a strange and sensual setting. Exploring memory, personal history, and ritual, Glaessner’s work questions the ways we relate to and re-imagine our past. Glaessner received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art where she received a post- graduate fellowship in 2013. Her work has been exhibited at P·P·O·W, Louis B. James, Sargent’s Daughters, New Release, BRIC, BAM, 1969 and more. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, Interview Magazine, Art of Choice, ARTnews and Modern Painters, among others. She was awarded residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme, Glogau AIR in Berlin and the Galveston Artist Residency, where she is living and working for one year. 

Fusing the corporeal, decorative, historical and functional, Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) creates detailed and uncanny sculptures that blur the boundaries between object and body, skin and worked surface. While pregnant with her first child, Keith-Roach became fascinated by her rapidly changing body and began taking plaster casts of her own breasts, later molding these casts onto large terracotta vessels sourced from Turkey or Greece. The resulting works anthropomorphize pottery to simultaneously celebrate the female form and breathe life into the storied history of domestic objects. Of this transformative process, Keith-Roach remarked, “Maybe it’s just a natural thing to anthropomorphize clay vessels. They’re calling out to be given characters.” Keith-Roach lives and works in Dorset. She graduated from Bristol University in 2008 with a BA in Art History. She has recently been part of exhibitions at Ben Hunter Gallery, London; MOCA, Los Angeles; Blue Projects, London; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), France; The Villa Lontana, Rome, Open Space Contemporary, London and Pervilion, Palermo and London. Keith-Roach curated the group exhibition Interiority at Ben Hunter Gallery in 2018. She is also an editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays.

Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) composes folkloric, figurative paintings from confident, abstract brushwork, utilizing broad strokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Harnessing both portentous and quotidian symbols, her uniquely irradiant paintings celebrating the female body and communal experience. Lady Lazarus, 2020, shows a totemic, chartreuse women squatting atop a broadly smiling donkey. Taking its title from a poem by Sylvia Plath, this work allegorizes a fearsome cycle of extinction and resurrection. Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. She was included in the influential Bad Painting exhibition at the New Museum, organized by Marcia Tucker. Her work is held in many permanent collections, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Her work is currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art: Five Propositions; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Sea Change: Highlights from PAFA’s Collection of 20th-century Art, and Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles in All of Them Witches, organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons.

Katharine Kuharic (b. 1962) uses a highly keyed pallet and meticulous, multi-layered compositions to create sensual and alluring scenes. Well known for images depicting American life and culture, her newest series takes a more contemplative note, painting each leaf and feather with a tenderness that is at once manic and meditative. Deriving its title from the term for an empty tomb or monument erected in honor of those who perished elsewhere, Kuharic’s Cenotaph, 2020, grapples with the passage of time, the erosion of our natural environment while contrasting nature’s abundant beauty with its piercing brutality. Kuharic completed her BFA in Painting and Drawing at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad including exhibits in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Stockholm, London, and Amsterdam. Kuharic has had museum exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the South Bend Regional Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and the Portsmouth Museum of Art.

Annabeth Rosen (b. 1957) explores the essential properties of ceramics by directly confronting the aesthetic and physical relationships between sculptural form and painterly surface. Her works will be presented by OBJECT & THING, a curated presentation of object-based works organized by Abby Bangser, Glenn Adamson and Rafael de Cárdenas. Rosen received her BFA from Alfred University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, several UC Davis Research Grants, and a Joan Mitchell Award for Painting and Sculpture. Rosen’s work is in the collection of the LA County Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, and The Everson Museum, as well as public and private collections throughout the country. Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2017 and traveled to the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2018 and The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco in 2019. Fables, a one-person exhibition of new sculptures and works on paper, will be on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art from March 22, 2020 – April 26, 2021.