Friedrichs Pontone is pleased to announce Under the Sun, a summer group exhibition featuring works by eight different artists. The exhibition represents a collection of artworks dedicated to exploring the ways in which humanity interacts with the environment, both in a physical and mental reality.
Reginald Baylor (b. 1966, United States) pursued his artistic passion at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, majoring in sculpture. Baylor's vibrant canvases invite viewers into a whimsical realm where nostalgia and futuristic optimism intertwine. His intricate attention to detail and playful use of color create a visual language that resonates deeply. Explore the iconic symbols, enigmatic figures, and dreamlike landscapes that bridge the past and future.
Claudia Doring Baez’s (b. 1960, Mexico) love for art history is expressed through her adherence to expressionism and her employment of provocative sequences. Baez’s quest to explore her own history is also displayed through her works as she confronts death, memory, and familial love. Her paintings resonate with the great artists from the past centuries, adopting details and repurposing images to create her own language of expression. By engaging with the history of art, Baez is able to confront the present with a visual language that remains familiar but also transformative amongst her contemporaries.
Massimo Giannoni's (b. 1954, Italy) work focuses upon the representation of places of dense storage and accumulation; places of memory. Libraries, stock exchanges, squares and natural science museums are recurring subjects. Within these spaces, the artist records an orderly and sometimes disorderly overabundance of information.
Madeleine Gross (b. 1993, United States) makes her singular and distinctive pictures by painting onto her own original photographs. Idyllic images of sunset Ontario lakes and gleaming Miami beaches are overlaid with expressively painted naked figures and gestural brush marks. The aesthetic contrast between the smooth, machine-made surface of the photographic background and the smears, clots and streaks of freely applied paint is immediately arresting. The artist's dramatic interventions prompt an inquiry into the personal significance of these pieces.
Henry Jabbour (b. 1961, Lebanon) graduated from New York Academy of Art in 2015 where he obtained a Master of Fine Art in Painting and Printmaking. His paintings focus on the human figure, exploring the emotive qualities of the body through colour and mark making. The artist welcomes us to a richly coloured world of pastoral reverie and lyrical contemplation. These evocative paintings contain images of small and intimate moments heavy with personal significance. Expressed in a flamboyant welter of exuberantly-applied paint, they vibrate with dynamic energy and creative enthusiasm.
Joseph Parra’s (b. 1990, United States) focus on the human form invites viewers to become viscerally attracted to his optical performance. His style of directly squeezing acrylic paint onto the canvas and creating a pattern of contrasting colors is inspired by the techniques established by the Neo-Impressionists. By contrasting the beautiful simplistic sublime of the human body with the scientific expression of both ocular and color theories, Parra creates seductive images that require meditation to fully grasp. Golden Shower (2025) is one of Parra’s latest paintings in which yellow droplets of acrylic paint are contrasted with brown droplets, resulting in a field of depth. When standing afar, a ‘golden’ man embracing a shower is revealed, which unbeknownst to him, his body is being viewed and analyzed by the viewer.
Chris Rivers (b. 1983, England) applies thick impasto across his canvases while overlaying mists of complementary tones, creating a unified cosmology that displays his interests in charged color abstractions and surrealist depictions. His oeuvre of expressive skyscapes captures the beauty, majesty, and allure of the universe. Rivers' grand gestural brush strokes emphasize his interest in painterly abstraction and signify his passion for exploring the limitless pictorial potential of the cosmos.
Anastasiya Tarasenko’s (b. 1989, Ukraine) body of paintings are often pastoral, convivial, and humorous. Her work acts as a social critique on the impact of hidden hypocrisies ubiquitous in our culture– often shadowed by the fervent joy that society is expected to embrace. Tarasenko’s paintings seemingly appear to be comical and clearly referencing Hieronymus Bosch, but they actually function as allegories for current political and social attitudes. Her confined imaginative scenes in her Reliquary of Utility (2021) series position her vintage meat cleavers as objects of religious allegorical significance– challenging the viewers to consider the relationship between the sacred and the profane and the ways in which we both venerate and utilize objects in our lives.
