KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to present their inaugural exhibition at The B-Sidelocated at 563 Grand Street, NYC 10002. The exhibition, titled “Square Pegs”, will be on view from October 13 to November 13, 2023, with a reception on Friday, October 13 from 5 to 8pm.

This group exhibition will include C.J. Chueca, Guillermo Garcia Cruz, Turiya Magadlela, Marisol Martinez, Juan Albeto Negroni, Martin Pelenur, Eric Santoscoy-Mcillip, Rudy Shepherd and Martin Touzon. 

The artists will be exploring the square shape and its significance in their practice as a starting point through various mediums and color compositions.

The square shape has been used extensively in art history, both as a compositional element and as a symbol with various meanings. One well-known example of the use of the square in art is the work of Kazimir Malevich, a Russian avant-garde artist who founded the Suprematist movement. Malevich's geometric compositions emphasized the primacy of form and rejected representation, with white squares on a white background representing the ultimate in non-objectivity.

Another notable example is the square format of some of the works of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, who was a member of the De Stijl movement. Mondrian used squares and rectangles to create compositions that were based on a grid structure, and which explored the relationship between color and form.

Artists on view:

C.J. Chueca (b.1977) is a Peruvian American artist born in Lima, Peru. She has lived between Lima and New York since 2003. Chueca’s history as a perpetual immigrant (earlier years found her in different cities in Mexico) has lead her to explore the concepts of home, territory, transit, multicultural experiences, uprooting and solitude. Focusing on discussions about lives that are still on the road (or without route) in the streets of the world. C.J. Chueca’s exhibition highlights include Micaela, La Sangre de Todas in Vigil Gonzales Galería, A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Eva Thornton at the Taubman Museum of Art, Art Souterrain in Montreal with a public commissioned installation curated by Dulce Pinzón at Palais des Congres and Hay algo incomestible en la garganta. Poéticas antipatriarcales y nueva escena en los años noventa curated by Miguel López at ICPNA-Lima to name a few. Her work has been featured in Hyperalergic, Artnet, Flaunt, Artishock and Artifoid. Forthcoming, C.J. Chueca will work in a public commission in the Bronx managed by Percent for Art, from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Guillermo García Cruz (b. 1988, Montevideo, Uruguay). Professor of Visual Arts by IPA, Montevideo, Uruguay. He has been part of Washington Studio School and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, USA. His work has been presented at group and solo exhibitions in Montevideo, Sao Paulo, Lima, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Miami, Washington DC, New York, Madrid, Barcelona, Timisioara, Lisbon and Tianjin. Among other articles and mentions, in 2019 he has been highlighted globally among the 12 artists in the focus of the next generation, by the Ibero-American site Arte Informado. He currently lives and works in the city of Dubai, UAE, developing an interdisciplinary body of work, made of painting, photography, action and installation, exploring a contemporary approach to the geometric question and the different conceptual interpretations that stem from its formal disruption.

Turiya Magadlela (b.1978, Johannesburg, S. Africa) is a South African artist who works with art making techniques that are traditionally used by women, using sewing and embroidery on various conceptually loaded fabrics, from pantyhose to correctional service uniforms, and creates abstract compositions by cutting, stitching, folding, and stretching these materials across canvas structures.

Her subject matter moves between articulations of personal experiences of woman and motherhood, and narratives from South African history.  Magadlela engages in a conversation on the colonization of black bodies and women; her art uses materials capitalist in nature at a time when commoditization is ever more prescient.

Marisol Martinez is a painter who contrasts both thru color and subject matter, often spatial as well as prismatic. The unguided stillness of each shape is a meditative process individually created to compliment the other. The interconnection of shapes and colors offer insight into Martinez unique experience of the world creating a visually spiritual vocabulary. She confronts the curious, the heartbreaking and the maddening experiences of living life so close to death. Daughter of a funeral director, Martinez was raised in a life defined by death. This familial legacy has allowed Martinez to tap into a spirituality that’s become the mystical centerpiece of her work.

Martinez has lived and studied in Paris, Miami and Los Angeles and received her degree from Parsons School of Design/The New School, NYC. She currently resides and works in NYC.

Juan Alberto Negroni (b.1979( Based in Dallas TX. Possess an MFA in Studio Arts from Southern Methodist University in Dallas TX, an MA Ed in Art History and Museum Studies from Caribbean University PR and a BFA with a Major in Printmaking from Puerto Rico School of Fine Arts and Design. Counts with several solo shows, like Tiny Floral Show, in Dallas TX and A Midsummers Night’s Dream at 18.2208° N, 66.5901° W, Texas Woman’s University, Denton TX,  Pacificaribbean at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, San Luis Obispo CA and Maneras de Llegar at Sagrado Corazón Univ. Art Gallery in San Juan PR. Has participated in multiple group shows such as Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study, SUPERFRONT LA, Los Angeles CA 2010, Dialectic City, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Muestra Nacional de Arts, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, San Juan PR 2015 and 2018, Art in America, (Curated by Julie Torres), Kinds of Monuments, (w/Christian Boltanski, Luis Camnitzer, Cai-Guo-Qiang, Robert Morrison, Alberto Burri, amongst others), Zattere Cultural Flow Zone, Dorsoduro, Venice IT, 2da Gran Bienal Tropical in Loiza, PR, Home & Visitor at Le Consortium, Dijon FR, Hail Mary at Liliana Bloch Gallery, Equity in the Arts Fellowship Exhibition, Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas TX, Galée Royale at Gallerie Rompone, Cologne DE, Garden Party, curated by Danielle Avram and many others. Recipient of  the 2017 Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'art Dijon Residency Fellowship. His practice has been documented in printed press and magazines like, ArtPulse, El Nuevo Día and PATRON Magazine.

Martin Pelenur (b.1977. Uruguay) is a visual artist and cultural producer, conducts La Pecera (located in La Barra, Punta del Este), an artist-run space for the promotion of visual arts in Uruguay.
As an artist, he has had a long career dating back to the beginning of the 2000th, during which he has taken part in numerous solo and group shows held in Uruguay and abroad.
Among his most recent exhibitions are Pigment Blue (Del Paseo Gallery, Manantiales, Uruguay), Cintas, concentración, repetición y deriva (Zielinsky Gallery, Barcelona, Spain), Línea Aceguá (Kavlin Cultural Center, Maldonado, Uruguay) and actually : “Línea Merín” in the MACA (Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art) in Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Pelenur understands painting as a way of thought and as an experimental practice. He researches about the conditions to produce Paint through exercises, systems and procedures he can then repeat. Works in series and utilizes paint as a perpetuos experiment.

Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip (b.1989) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He was born and raised in the U.S./Mexico borderland city of El Paso, Texas. Eric earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2011, a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2015 focusing on art education and border studies, and a MFA in Fine Art from the New York University in 2017. He has shown in Texas, New Mexico, and New York.

Rudy Shepherd (b. 1975, Baltimore, MD) received an MFA in sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago.  He has been in solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA and group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, NY, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, the Bronx Museum of Art, among others.

Shepherd’s work explores the nature of evil through the mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture.  This exploration involves investigations into the lives of criminals and victims of crime.  He explores the complexity of these stories and the grey areas between innocence and guilt in a series of paintings and drawings of both the criminals and the victims, making no visual distinctions between the two.  Going along with these portraits is a series of sculptures called Black Rock Negative Energy Absorbers.  They are a group of sculptures meant to remove negative energy from people allowing them to respond to life with the more positive aspects of their personality.

Growing out of this exploration for solutions to the overwhelming forces of negative energy has come a series of ceramic sculptures called the Healing Device’s and a series of paintings of Holy Mountains, sacred spaces from all over the world that are central to the religious and cultures of the world and a series of live performances featuring a character Shepherd created called The Healer.

Martín Touzón (b. 1985) Born just after the fall of the Argentine dictatorship, he grew up in a fragile new democracy plagued by economic crisis and hyperinflation. His personal motivations led him to study economics and then to take part in the UTDT Artists Program. His education is not just focused on a formal institutional level, it was also nourished by working with other artists in their projects and exhibitions.

Since then, his work has addressed the crossroads between art and economics through processes that involve media such as sculpture, installation, performance, and painting to question aspects of today's society.

Touzón has exhibited individually and in group shows, also made large scale sculptures and performances as public space interventions. In addition, he participated in residencies at The Banff Center (CA) and in Torino (IT) as a prize winner for the Premio Italia - Argentina per l'Arte.  Among others, he is a recipient of the Creation Grant by the Metropolitan Fund for Culture, Arts and Science, the Patronage of the City of Buenos Aires and the Bicentennial Grant of the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in the public collection of La Rural (AR) and in other international private collections.

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