Kates-Ferri Projects is proud to announce FUTURE PERFECT, a virtual exhibition in partnership with Artsy.
Future Perfect is the first of a series of virtual exhibitions introducing and showcasing artists that Kates-Ferri Projects will be collaborating with in the near future.
Participating Artists: Vicky Barranguet and Nicole Basilone, both female abstract painters pushing the conversation for inclusion in the art historical cannon; Emilia Olsen, Kevin Sabo, and Cecile Chong, touching on topics of identity and place in the world; Martin Pelenur, G.T. Pellizzi, and Martin Touzon, Latinx artists using alternative materials to create geometric abstractions.
Exhibiting artists highlights:
New York-based Uruguayan artist Vicky Barranguet (b.1973) uses the language of traditionally male-dominated abstract expressionism to create vibrant abstractions that flow and diverge across her massive canvases with a sense of urgency. Barranguet combines painting with music to express the rhythm and harmony of spontaneous and intense emotions.
Nicole Basilone (b.1988), a New Jersey native, creates landscape abstractions focusing on the shifting of light on her subject, a practice that began during an undergraduate landscape course. On view is a pair of paintings depicting a zoomed-in view from Basilone’s Jersey City studio one done during the day and the other at night. Through the energetic drips of paint, the viewer can glimpse chartreuse vines and leaves swirling through patches of lavender sky.
South Africa-born American artist Emilia Olsen (b.1989), based in Brooklyn, offers a vulnerable exploration into self-care and the female body. The rounded nude figures offer an intimacy with the viewer while also creating distance by obscuring faces with bent arms. Olsen’s Bathers series depicts a figure floating just near the surface, debating whether to come up for air or dive deeper. The water abstracts the body, operating as a dissolution of self and allowing the artist's creative subconscious to take over.
Kevin Sabo (b.1991), a Virginia-based multimedia artist creates highly stylized figures with severe, angular faces and wildly patterned clothing that dance and stomp through introspections on persona and self-expression. Each work is enveloped in themes of “queer identity, satire, and existential revelations.” Inspired by the idealized “feminine goddesses” of his childhood, including Pamela Anderson, Lil Kim, and Britney Spears, the characters are Sabo’s alter ego personified in drag.
Cecile Chong (b.1964), was born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and grew up in Quito and Macau, now practices in New York City. Her Strainger series of hand-beaded, mask-like sculptures is a play-on-words between “strangers” and “strainers”. The strainer suggests the act of separation, liquid from solid, interior from exterior, insider from outsider, and the exotic from the mundane. The works feature an image of the guagua (Quechua for baby) created with beads donated from necklaces, rosaries, and repurposed accessories and woven with natural materials from Ecuador such as tagua, acai, pambil, and seeds from the Amazon. The face of the guagua is left unbeaded, revealing a mirror where the viewer’s own “strained” reflection becomes part of the piece.
The Tape series by Uruguayan artist Martin Pelenur (b.1977) transforms the mundane, everyday material of painter’s tape into a bold geometric abstraction, with the texture of overlapping lines and subtle shifts in tone across the work’s surface. Through the act of weaving blue and black tape, Pelenur investigates a mathematical grid and systems of patterns. The blue-and-black piece gives a nod to Ellsworth Kelly, while the black-on- black grids are reminiscent of the subtle tone-on-tone black paintings by Ad Reinhardt.
G.T. Pellizzi (b.1978) lives and works in New York City and Mexico and was a founding member of the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Pellizzi, a student of philosophy and architecture, engages with the metropolitan landscape with his Conduit series, constructed of illuminated red, yellow, and blue light bulbs connected by a network of stainless-steel rods. Echoing Piet Mondrian’s New York paintings and Broadway Boogie Woogie, Pellizzi’s wall installations evoke the buzzing energy and movement of an ever-changing metropolis and the networks of power concealed beneath the surface.
Argentinian artist Martin Touzon (b.1985) in his Medias Hojas series transforms single socks left at laundromats into abstract compositions. Touzon gathers the “lonely” socks and partners them off by size, then processes the raw materials into a handmade, almost furry paper molded into grids of slate gray, mottled pale pink, brick red. Each work is a “media hoja” or “half sheet” that brings together mismatched, left-behind belongings of strangers to create a new, unified material.
Kates-Ferri Projects has been instrumental in jumpstarting the career of many artists and believes Future Perfect will become the “ones to watch” list for collectors, curators, and art advisors.
