Timely, Timeless
RJ Calabrese
June 27 - July 31, 2024
Bunker Room 3- Game Rooms, water soluble oil, polymer clay, moldable plastic silicone on wood,
18”X 18” X 2”
Timely, Timeless is RJ Calabrese’s debut solo show with Rosebud contemporary, NY.
Timeless, no: no more than our own time. Timely, however, yes. We live in a world as senseless as that portrayed by RJ Calabrese, as violent and as perverse. The difference is we imagine our own world is governed by reason, not whim. We ascribe the cruelty of our world to wickedness which we think is an exception, not seated in the very diaper of God, where it is the center of gravity for all being.
In Calabrese’s world nonsensical grotesque violence is unabashedly the rule, and perhaps that is why for all its outlandish and elegant monstrosity it seems so familiar. Underneath it all we know violence, domination and cruelty are banal and common, even if we pretend, they are an aberration from some imagined ideal essence just beyond reach, to which we shall return. But alas, as Calabrese shows us, our fate is not grace, but gross, and our end comes not with a bang but with a whimper.
– Andrew Paul Keiper
Tone
LARRY GREENBERG
May 16 - June 20, 2024
Collapsing grid, 36” X 36” acrylic on canvas
“Tone” is a word with multiple meanings. To Larry Greenberg, tone becomes the personal mode of operation. Working with muted colors, Greenberg explores compositional openings that create visual/spatial ambiguities. Greenberg’s paintings are abstract and intuitive. Close-valued hues in rectilinear geometries become luminous inventions. He uses color interactions and fresco-like surfaces to create mystical works.
Greenberg’s work emerges from his lifelong dedication to rigorous artistic inquiry, one that he shares with pre-renaissance painters, modern masters, and the postmodern mind. Thus, he works in his Brooklyn studio, a place that lets him ponder in solitude, allowing him to bring forth these poetic abstractions.
Vision of the Invisible
An Exhibition of Drawings
February 22 –April 25, 2024
Don Doe, Chandru G, Chris Bors, Nitin Mukul, Stan Narten, Natesh M, RJ Calabrese, Ebenezer Singh
Don Doe, Triadic Harmony, 25″ x19″, Charcoal & pastel, 2023
Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present Vision of the Invisible, an exhibition of drawings by eight artists, Don Doe, Chandru G, Chris Bors, Nitin Mukul, Stan Narten, Natesh M, RJ Calabrese, and Ebenezer Singh, opening on February 22, 2024, at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY. Each artist has contributed three of their most visionary drawings towards the show. A drawing is a vision, a memory, a sign, a scribble, an instantaneous reaction using a simple tool on any available surface. Drawings are inscriptions, visible signs of the invisible. A drawing is a ‘no-drama’ acted out in person. While a painting may be an activity initiated by a milieu or a societal structure, a drawing dawns from within the artist, only to be realized using simple tools. One of Joseph Beuys’s pencil drawings opens a world of inquiries, and one of Willem de Kooning’s drawings can be erased entirely by Robert Rauschenberg and still be a ‘no-drawing’ drawing.
Drawing has even been a tool for poets and composers. From William Blake to Kahlil Gibran, Arnold Schoenberg to John Cage, drawings take on intricate meanings in the minds of these creative practitioners of other mediums. Rosebud Contemporary, in its pursuit of digging deep into the minds of our contemporary artists, is re-establishing the fact that the drawings do matter. They matter not because they can become a painting in an artist’s studio, but also because they exist on their own as the artist’s immediate vision.
Jacques Derrida, from whose words the title of the exhibition ‘Vision of the Invisible’ is derived, speaks of one of the Rembrandt’s drawings in his work ‘Memoirs of the Blind, The Self-Portrait, and Other Ruins’: ‘The memory of the event must be inscribed. The debt must be repaid with words on parchment, which is to say, with visible signs of the invisible…. What guides the graphic point, the quill, pencil, or scalpel is the respectful observance of a commandment, the acknowledgement before knowledge, the gratitude of the receiving before seeing, the blessing before the knowing’.
HORSEPLAY
October 12 - December 22, 2023
EBENEZER SINGH
Ebenezer Singh, Bucephalus 66" X 48", oil on linen
Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present Horseplay, an exhibition of paintings by Ebenezer Singh opening on October 12, 2023, at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY. This is the artists first solo show with the gallery. The Exhibition contains five new paintings from the artist showing the interplay of corporeal and conjectural play of horses as his self-images.
Horseplay: the word indicates rude, rowdy, or inappropriate play. The artist engages himself in the mischief inherent in this term, flouting audience expectation and anchoring us to his imagery. He announces a certain irreverence for boundary, for orthodoxy. The artist becomes a winking deity, taking on known challenges and relying on the imaginative to generate a metaphysical, moral reality. Singh’s horse is the intuitive, sensitive messenger that translates his image-ideas from the metaphysical world to ours. Bold lines, subtle tones and paint-heavy brushstrokes carve out the physical lineaments of these animals – a bridle, a leg, a hand cue, all exist at a delicious interface between the real and the fantastically unreal. The horse becomes his other half, his avatar, the Frou-Frou to his County Vronsky, the companion of the man whose death resembles the death of all he loves. Singh’s beasts thus play on his painterly desires, fancies, and fantasies. They then emerge, dappled and dense with story, onto his canvases.
The work ‘Bucephalus’, oil on linen, 66”X 48” has the reference to Alexander’s horse that stood with him in all his gallant battles from Greece to India. The skull under its lifted leg though it holds a psychological sensory nature to it, it poetically implies the might of myth and heroic tales. With his unique and cathartic rendering style, Singh layers and builds his canvas space with broad brush strokes only to leave out breathing spaces for the previously laid colors.
‘Horse Girl’ is a poetic take on Virginia Wolf’s quote “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses”. The intellectual facility that the women have over men in the gender war of the world captivates the artist to whimsically combine the horse and a woman. From the bright yellow background, the horse girl looks at the viewer both quizzically and confidently with the cerebral prowess.
Remembrance of Things Past
July 13 - September 28
GRAHAM GILLMORE
STAN NARTEN
EBENEZER SINGH
Ebenezer Singh, Lick, 54"X38", oil on linen
Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present its inaugural summer exhibition ‘Remembrance of Things Past: Graham Gillmore, Stan Narten, Ebenezer Singh’ from July 13th until August 17th at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY 10001. Our opening reception will be held from 6 pm to 8 pm. The exhibition contains three new paintings from each of our artists. Every work reverberates with this theme: remembering pushes us forward. French author Marcel Proust got it right with the title of his most famous work: human nature is a study in ‘remembrance of things past’. Consider the stucco-grey American flags of Jasper Johns, or Cimabue’s golden crucifix hanging from a Florentine church nave. Art reveals that the symbols we traffic in depend on our collective memory of history. Our everyday structures, even the buildings holding us up and the flags fluttering outside our homes, are a result of collective memory. War blooms across the world in terrific variety. Battlefields look only slightly different. The Sonoran Desert at the US-Mexico border. Grimdark-grey fallout shelters in Odesa, Mariupol, Kyiv. The entire Mediterranean Sea. A planet’s past is being remembered, with untenable violence and displacement.
Everything in the past is always waiting, waiting to detonate, said architectural historian Vincent Scully. For these artists, the past detonates daily on their canvases, as it does outside their studio windows. We exorcise history every day by keeping things from the past, by remembering. Rosebud Contemporary’s exhibition ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ contains a body of work that reverberates with this theme. The artist’s lived experiences transfigure their canvas as an irrepressible ‘anima’. This anima is a proxy for Proust’s madeleine, in its ability to recall childhood memory through the inchoate prisms of adult post-modern experience. Everyone has a madeleine, that plain French biscuit that involuntarily summons a host of powerful childhood memories for Proust in ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. For Gillmore, the past is exorcised through the terse elegance of word-as-image. For Narten, there is a droll disillusionment in the motley memories of his urban life, even as potential light sources dance everywhere. For Singh, his anima occupies the female spirits of his life, those potent madeleines that conjure up memories of nature, sensuality and the supernatural. For all three artists, their present canvases tumble through memory and ford streams of remembrance. What we as viewers are left with, are gorgeous palimpsests of their collective past.