Interviews by Brainard Carey

Rob Ober (b. 1968, Wiesbaden, West Germany) lives and works in Kent, CT. Having grown up as the son of a US diplomat, Rob spent his youth in Moscow, Dehli, Athens and Bethesda, MD. After college, Rob began collecting Russian nonconformist art.

In 2006, Rob opened a gallery in Kent, CT and showed the works of many of his artist friends including Brian Belott, Katherine Bradford, Lance De Los Reyes, and Rob Nava. Rob began painting seriously seven years ago. Art Miami  2021 was the first exhibition of his work. Rob is having his first solo exhibition at SHRINE gallery.

Fruit Loops, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 in  (182.9 x 152.4 cm)

Napoleon, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 96 x 72 in  (243.8 x 182.9 cm)

Yes, No, Probably, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 in  (152.4 x 121.9 cm)

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor, painter, and art critic, and Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2019. She taught art history, the in the graduate design section of the Yale School of Drama until May 2020, and the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000.

Ann McCoy’ work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Art, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D..

Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich She has studied alchemy since the early seventies in Zurich, and Rome at the Vatican Library.

The Death of My Father, 2012, pencil on paper on canvas, 9 by 14 ft. photo credit : Peter Dressler

The Wolf Tongue Mill, 2022, 9 by 14 ft. pencil on paper on canvas

Meghann Riepenhoff © Geoffrey Berliner

Meghann Riepenhoff’s (b. 1979; Atlanta, GA) work has been presented internationally in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; C/O Berlin, Germany; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; and Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX.

Her work is held in permanent collections across the United States, including those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, among others. In 2018, the artist was selected as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Riepenhoff earned her BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist divides her time between Bainbridge Island, WA, and San Francisco, CA.

Her book, mentioned in the interview is Ice.

Meghann Riepenhoff , Waters of the Americas: Eastman Kodak’s Emissions A (Confluence of the Genesee River and Lake Ontario, Rochester, NY, 03.14.2022), 2022 Three Dynamic Cyanotypes, Approximately 59 1/2" x 42" (151 x 106.5 cm) each element. © Meghann Riepenhoff, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York 

Meghann Riepenhoff, Waters of the Americas: Eastman Kodak’s Emissions C (Confluence of the Genesee River and Lake Ontario, Rochester, NY, 03.13.2022), 2022. Dynamic Cyanotype, Approximately 59" x 59" (150 x 150 cm) © Meghann Riepenhoff, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Ezra Johnson's work has been included in group shows at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the ICA Philadelphia, and the Site Santa Fe Biennial.

His work is included in the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Johnson’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Rail, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times. His BFA was conferred from the California College of the Arts and Crafts, and he received his MFA from Hunter College.

Ezra Johnson, Shot Winner, 2022 oil on linen, 72h x 48w in, 182.88h x 121.92w cm

Ezra Johnson,  Sometimes Shaky, 2022 oil on linen, 69h x 49w in, 175.26h x 124.46w cm

Ezra Johnson, The Painter, 2022 oil on linen, 80h x 48w in 203.20h x 121.92w cm

Tyler Brandon, Born 1991 in Hollywood, Florida. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

In “Fire Paintings”, at Shelter, Brandon simplifies both composition and subject matter, depicting iconography from the natural world. Using primary colors with immediacy, the artist offers a reimagination of the western tradition of landscape painting.

Elements of nature become cryptic symbols that return the gaze of the viewer in their frontality. The compositional relationships of these icons suggest they correlate within a larger narrative, functioning together like hieroglyphics. Brandon uses these symbols to depict that which is eternal while at play, like the goddesses and gods of Ancient Greece and Rome.

For Brandon, the common denominator throughout this body of work is reduction, removing the excess until he arrives at the emblematic symbol. The artist explores the inclinations of our formative years, before one develops a strong sense of self. These basic elements are what unite us before we take on the weight of our society’s complexities.

"Basic Principle" Oil & oil stick on canvas 30 x 40

"Law of Attraction" Oil & oil stick in canvas 30 x 40

"Right Place, Right Time" Oil & oil stick on canvas 30 x 40

Peter Gallo Portrait by Shani Stoddard

The work of artist Peter Gallo oscillates freely between painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Filled with literary, art-­historical, cultural, political, and musical references and detours, Gallo’s works, when installed together, create poetic, albeit labyrinthine, mise-­en-­scènes.

The critic James Yood identified in Gallo: "an apparent disdain for materials; an alert scavenger’s attitude toward culture; an eye for the poignant frailties of the vernacular; and an occasionally breathtaking ability to evoke issues of great import. His work is, inevitably, a mixed bag, because he treats the world and his mind as jumbled compendiums, filled with little connections and bursts of revelation that his seemingly slight but actually pointed interventions reveal. It amounts to a kind of grunge arte povera, a witty and instinctive immersion in the stuff of the world that is alternately lax and labored, spottily profound. A partial inventory of Gallo’s materials would include dental floss, toothpicks, a towel, string, wire, French vermilion oil paint, buttons, toilet paper, spackle, bric-­a-­brac, a bedsheet, picture frames, amateur sculptures, and patterned fabrics. These are usually mixed with snippets of found text or references to figures of cultural authority, either scrawled onto surfaces, collaged, or laboriously constructed as sculptures that allude to the likes of Spengler, Nietzsche, Kant, Pasolini, and Mondrian. His output becomes a kind of pantheon of gravitas—or, in its use of vernacular text, antigravitas made vital by the intensity of Gallo’s scribbles and his disinterest in pictorial nicety." – Artforum, February 2005.

Gallo’s deceptively quiet body of work combines images from sources as diverse as gay pornography and ornithology with words by Roland Barthes, Freud, and bands like Joy Division and The Cocteau Twins. He utilizes simple formal structures that emphasize the materiality of painting, and his works alternate between, or combine, abstract, figurative, and textual elements. Nautical imagery derived from historical sources such as the Ship of Fools and the Ship of State, stands as one of his signature subjects.

Peter Gallo (b. 1959, Rutland, VT) lives and works in Hyde Park, VT. He received a BA from Middlebury College, and an MA and a PhD in Art History from Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin; White Columns, New York; Horton Gallery (Sunday LES), New York; and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; among others. The gallery presented a solo booth of the artist’s work at The Independent Brussels in 2018 and a two-person exhibition The Patients and The Doctors with David Byrd in 2015. The artist’s work has been included in Artforum, the Village Voice, The New York Times, and Art in America, among others.

Peter Gallo, My Modernism, 2018, Oil on bed ticking, 19 x 23 in, 48.3 x 58.4 cm, Courtesy of Sean Horton (Presents), New York, Photo: Matt Grubb

Peter Gallo fiat ars pereat mundus, 2018—2019, Oil on cradled plywood 11 x 17 in 27.9 x 43.2 cm Courtesy of Sean Horton (Presents), New York Photo: Matt Grubb

Peter Gallo, All Tomorrow’s Crucifixions, 2021, Oil & collage on plywood cabinet doors, 72 x 48 in, 182.9 x 121.9 cm, Courtesy of Sean Horton (Presents), New York, Photo: Matt Grubb

Fotograf: Elmar Vestner, Berlin

Berlin based artist Sabine Hornig is known for her work combining sculpture, photography and installation to produce complex works allowing for new interpretations of conventional histories, memory, perspectives, and the lived environment. Her works explore the tension between surface plane and three-dimensional space, often treating transparent architectural mediums such as glass simultaneously as a surface, subject, and portal. At once rigorously formal and poetic, her works recontextualize familiar places and challenge individual views in the context of societal perspectives. By inverting perspectives and hierarchies, they make visible hidden contexts and communicate the interconnectedness of elements and conditions we usually separate.

Her most notable works include La Guardia Vistas, LaGuardia Airport, New York; Shadows, Sydney International Towers, Barangaroo; Double Transparency, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Durchs Fenster, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Room with Large Window, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; The Second Room, Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon; Projects 78, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Hornig is currently working on a commission for a new federal parliament building in Berlin. Her work is also on view at Give and Take. Bilder über Bilder, Hamburger Kunsthalle through August 28.

Sabine Hornig, This Is No Time, 2022  Photo: Daniel Bradica, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York/ Los Angeles. © Sabine Hornig

Sabine Hornig, La Guardia Vistas, 2020 Latex ink and vinyl mounted on glass. Commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund for LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of the artist; La Guardia Gateway Partners; Public Art Fund, NY; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York/ Los Angeles. © Sabine HornigPhoto by Nicholas Knight

Sabine Hornig, World of Tomorrow, 2022 Pigment print on archival paper. Photo: Sabine Hornig, Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York/ Los Angeles. © Sabine Hornig

Marley Freeman Portrait by Sarah Rice, The New York Times

Marley Freeman is a New York-based artist who combines the disciplines of abstract and representational painting. Her unique facture is characterized by the hand-mixed gesso, acrylic, and oils she uses to create meticulous, psychologically-charged color fields. Through this technical process, she studies the ways in which paint “wants to perform.” “Pigments have their own ways of acting,” Freeman says, “and I became obsessed with learning their traits.” Freeman’s distinct vocabulary of forms is made up of brushy strokes, color washes, and shapes that freely transform across the picture plane. The influence of textile design is evident in her close attention to the textural subtleties of her paints, and her reverence for their surface effects—their impressions in the warp and weft of the canvas.

Freeman completed her MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College, New York, and her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Freeman’s work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas; and the Colorado University Art Museum, Bolder, Colorado.

Marley Freeman, tuned to existence, 2021, Oil and acrylic on linen, 8⅛ x 9⅛ inches; 20.65 x 23.19 cm, 9¼ x 10¼ inches; 23.5 x 26 cm (framed)

Marley Freeman, a self area, 2021, Oil and acrylic on linen, 54 x 54⅛ inches; 137.2 x 137.5 cm, 54¾ x 54⅞ inches; 139.1 x 139.4 cm (framed)

Gregor Hildebrandt’s signature media are cassette tape and vinyl, which he collages and assembles into apparently minimalist yet latently romantic paintings, sculptures, and installations. Resting in silence behind the glossy surface of his analog aesthetics, which verges on black and white monochrome, music and cinema haunt his practice. Whether pictorial or sculptural, all of his works contain prerecorded materials, which he references in the titles.

These pop-cultural sources, usually a single song, are meant to trigger both collective and personal memories. Like analog storage media, his distinctive rip-off technique is a metaphor for the mnestic process itself: it consists in rubbing magnetic coating against double-sided adhesive tape stuck on canvas to trace intricate and elusive powdery patterns. Further relating to architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, Hildebrandt’s monumental sonic barriers made of stacked, bowl-shaped records and his sensual wall curtains made of unreeled tapes create paths for the visitors of his shows.

Installation View of Gregor Hildebrandt's Was Geht Uns Die Sonne An (What Does the Sun Matter to Us) at Perrotin New York, 2022. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Mary Nolan Kasten, 2022, Ink jet print, plastic cases, inlays in woodencase, 159.5 x 111.5 x 9 cm. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Cut records, wood, canvas Ø : 92 cm. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Sam Lipp’s paintings draw from a wide range of found images, committing ready-made pictures and the artist’s own photographs to painstaking recreations using a unique process of additive color applied with steel wool. Encompassing directive street signs, Michael Jackson’s transformed face, sexual domination, and sites of civic ordinance, Lipp’s source material exists at the intersection of the body and power. In Lipp’s additive and highly tangible paint application, pin-sized dots of impasto accumulate to create nuanced hues, establishing concrete analogs to fugitive virtual signs. The resulting works are both highly tactile paintings and direct references to the mechanics of screen culture; at once obfuscated by a dappled fog and rigorously precise. Through these effects, the artist underscores the power of visual culture to govern our lived experience, linking pictures and control.

Sam Lipp (b. 1989, London) lives and works in New York. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2022; 2016; 2014); Bonny Poon, Paris (2019); Central Fine, Miami (2015) and Neochrome, Turin (2015). Group exhibitions include Derosia (2021); Cell Project Space, London (2019); Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London; traveled to Grand Palais, Paris; Bundeskunstalle, Bonn, Germany; and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2018—2019); Bonny Poon, Paris (2017); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2016).

Sam Lipp Pollution twink, 2022 Oil on steel, screws 19 x 23 x .06 in (48.3 x 58.4 x .2 cm)

Sam LippPornocracy 2, 2022Oil on steel66 x 24 x .75 in (167.6 x 61 x 1.9 cm)