Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia
An exhibition at THERE in New York City, June 1-8, 2024.
I’m pleased to announce my first solo exhibition in New York City, “Tangibilia,” to be held at THERE, in a neighborhood that has been described to me as Chelsea-ish.
Information, an artist statement, and a press release follow, but first: it has been so long since I’ve sent out a physical card that even if my mailing list hadn’t disappeared in a data loss in 2022, it would probably be mostly trash anyway. If you’d like to receive a mailed invitation, please send your postal address to dissidentmuse@proton.me and I’ll get one out to you. Even if you can’t attend, I’d be grateful for your interest and happy to send you a card.
Information
Title: “Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia”
Start date: Saturday, June 1, opening reception 3-6 PM.
End date: Saturday, June 8, with the gallery open to the public 12-5 PM. On the 8th the gallery will have copies of Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard available for signing by Einspruch, the book’s editor.
Gallery: THERE, 135 W. 26th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), 9B, New York City. Between the public hours on June 1 and June 8 the gallery is open by appointment; contact dissidentmuse@proton.me.
Artist’s Statement
Tangibilia is a coinage of Philip Guston’s that appears in a few places in the compilation of his talks and conversations titled I Paint What I Want to See. He used it to describe the common objects that began to interest him after his turn away from abstraction: “a shoe, a book, a hand.” Doing so struck him as “an even greater enigma” than abstraction, “Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity.” He echoed Giorgio Morandi: “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”
I come out of a dual background in illustration and abstract painting and have long sought ways to make figurative paintings that honor the aspirations of modernist abstraction. Mostly that meant using high volumes of paint to make pictures from observation, sort of a greatly magnified Impressionism. My work transformed completely upon moving to agricultural New Hampshire. Informed about equally by some favorite alternative comics and the Milton Avery exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2022, I started rendering scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space. They are wholly invented and synthetic, with slight concessions to naturalism and nearly none to observation. The physicality of the paint remains important but I’m trying to achieve a sense of visual pressure through facture rather than sheer quantity. These shifts in emphasis allowed for some experiments in printmaking.
The images coalesced around scenarios in which touch plays a meaningful role: gardening, knitting, lovemaking, the act of painting itself. “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing,” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.” That fabric is tangibilia, and I’m interested in art that relishes contact with it.
Press Release
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” opens at THERE in New York City on Saturday, June 1, 2024, with a reception 3-6 PM. “Tangibilia” is the artist’s 21st solo exhibition and his first in New York. The exhibition runs through June 8, for which the gallery will be open to the public 12-5 PM. On the 8th copies of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard (Allworth Press, 2024), which Einspruch edited, will be available at the gallery for signing.
The artist's journey took a transformative turn upon relocating from Boston to five wooded acres in southern New Hampshire in 2022. Influenced by alternative comics and American figurative modernism, Einspruch began to explore scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space. The resulting images are sourced from imagination and memory, composed intuitively, and rendered with a careful but lush application of broad areas of color. The exhibition includes recent paintings in oil and egg tempera, as well as prints in mokuhanga and white-line woodcut.
Tangibilia, explains the artist in his statement, is a coinage of painter Philip Guston to describe common objects that take on an enigmatic character when considered artistically. Einspruch’s images “coalesced around scenarios in which touch plays a meaningful role: gardening, knitting, lovemaking, the act of painting itself.” Tangibilia also connects to the physicality of paint, which Einspruch explored as a student under noted second-generation abstractionist Walter Darby Bannard.
While working as an artist and teacher out of his New Hampshire studio, Einspruch is also an art critic who contributes regularly to The New Criterion. He is a Fulbright scholar (Austria 2018-19), in which capacity he was the Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Artist-In-Residence in Vienna. He is the proprietor of Dissident Muse, which includes a publishing imprint and an online curatorial project, the Dissident Museum, which will launch in the Summer of 2024 thanks to an inaugural FAIR in the Arts Grant from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. He is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, which Allworth Press published in January 2024, and Backseat Driver by James Croak, which Dissident Muse published in December 2023. He has been blogging about art since 2000, most recently at Dissident Muse Journal at Substack.
THERE is located at 135 W. 26th Street, 9B, New York City. In the days between public hours on June 1 and June 8, it is open by appointment; contact dissidentmuse@proton.me to view the exhibition or for more information.
Quick info:
Title: “Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia”
Start date: Saturday, June 1, opening reception 3-6 PM.
End date: Saturday, June 8, with the gallery open to the public 12-5 PM. On the 8th the gallery will have copies of Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard available for signing by Einspruch, the book’s editor.
Gallery: THERE, 135 W. 26th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), 9B, New York City. Between the public hours on June 1 and June 8 the gallery is open by appointment; contact dissidentmuse@proton.me.
Press inquiries and images: dissidentmuse@proton.me
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The current entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel. For more information see the ASBC calendar.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
Finally wading through old emails. Mazel Tov!!! I would be there in a second but for local events both weekends. But I'll share w/my NY friends. Exciting & well-deserved!
Best wishes. I like these makings.