Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition of new works by Sydney Licht, Getting warmer. It will be Licht’s sixth solo exhibition with Kathryn Markel. The exhibition will take place from September 5th to October 12th at 179 10th Avenue. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 5th from 6PM to 8PM.
Licht’s oeuvre makes meaning from the application of color. Using palette knives, the artist creates bold, sculptural gestures with generous amounts of paint that forefront each color’s unique quality. Of her work, Licht states, “Color in its quantity and specificity can affect how we perceive things as either developed illusions or simple shapes”. The title of the exhibition– Getting warmer –playfully calls attention to the potential for evolution while maintaining a specifcic artistic ethos. Though Licht has long focused on the potentialities of both color and representation, her body of work continues to reveal new avenues for expression.
Licht’s application of color distills quotidian objects into their most basic forms: books, notecards, purses, and matchboxes become loosely defined silhouettes. The artist’s abstract language subverts the intimate experiences of objects that one experiences in daily life; visual information is pared down to shapes and textures, all through the intentional application of pigment. This technique challenges the boundaries of what a still-life can be as Licht’s works straddle the line between representation and abstraction.
In diverging from the confines of figuration, Licht’s new work allows relationships between hues to emerge, situating the still-life as a dialogue rather than a static image. Licht’s utilization of color manipulates space, forefronting its capability to allow objects to emerge from the pictorial plane. In a 1997 review of Licht’s work, Barbara Buchholz cleverly noted a determination between voyeurism and participation when viewing Licht’s work. Indeed, Licht’s clever configuration of space and color immerse the viewer in an environment of the artist’s making.
Sydney Licht has exhibited across the United States, including a 2022 solo exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum in Bangor, Maine. Group exhibitions include those at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Memorial Art Gallery Museum of the University of Rochester and as well as at numerous commercial galleries nationwide. She was a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Grant, a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, a Yaddo Residency Fellowship, and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome on three occasions, most recently in November 2023. Her work has been reviewed in The Chicago Tribune , The Chicago Sun-Times and by Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine.