SoHyun Bae at 375 Hudson Street

375 Hudson Street is pleased to present 12 works by American painter SoHyun Bae on view in the lobby gallery through March 2025. Bae’s ethereal works straddle abstraction and representation, drawing upon influences from disparate sources such as Jewish mysticism, classical antiquity, and traditional Korean arts to convey a deep sense of spirituality. The artist has said that she seeks silence in her work, and that her practice “is about making a gesture, a secret sign on the surface of the canvas, opening up possibilities.”  One can see this idea in paintings such as So Wang Mo’s Garden, and Jasper Lake I and II, which mix focused passages that seem to describe fruits or rocks or water alongside more diffuse washes of color that suggest a vast pictorial space.  Bae evokes a sense of landscape in many of the other canvases on view, like in Sikussak and I Penitenti, where a horizon line set low along their bottom edges provides the setting for ethereal shards which read as rocky outcrops emerging from the ocean.

The process used by Bae is quite unusual. The artist shapes and tears pieces of rice paper which are incorporated into the surfaces of the paintings. Bae allows the paint to soak into the canvas, pouring and manipulating the viscous medium. The fragments of rice paper maintain their shape but wrinkle in response to the fluid paint and absorb it in a different way, creating texture, depth and variation of light, adding drama.  Bae works with highly concentrated pigments rather than standard oil or acrylic paints, generating an extraordinary intensity and luminosity of color.  The results, as seen in the displayed paintings which cover over a decade from Bae’s career, are at once transcendent and contemplative. 

SoHyun Bae holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in from Boston University as well as a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University.  She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Please direct any inquiries about these works to  artinfo@sohyunbae.com

Paul Hunter at 100 Wall Street

New York-based artist Paul Hunter has two paintings from his Libretto series on view in the lobby of 100 Wall Street through August 2024.

Inspired by his daily drawing practice, these paintings are composed through a process of linear repetition––multiple layers of lines, each drawn and painted by hand onto shimmering gold and metal-leafed canvases. Etched into wet transparent paint, these lines allow the intensive glow and energy of the underlying gold and metal to reflect outwards through the paint. The slight variation between lines creates an undulating pattern giving them depth and a unique optical quality. Merging reading, writing, and painting, these works invite contemplative looking over time comparable to listening to a musical score––as Hunter says, "Music, like a walk through a landscape, unfolds over time, in a flow, with beginnings and ends, and crescendos and lulls, depending on what we notice, or where we started." 

Born in Paris to Canadian parents, Paul Hunter grew up in Quebec City, and earned an MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, before moving to New York City where he continues to work in his Harlem studio. Please direct any inquiries about these works to info@paulhunterart.com. The show is open to the public from 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday through Friday.

Carolanna Parlato at 860 Washington Street

860 Washington Street is pleased to present an exhibition of four works by New York-based painter Carolanna Parlato in the lobby gallery through April 2024. Riddled with painterly gestures, bold lyricism, and an unabashed sense of color, Parlato’s paintings draw inspiration from her surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood. Fascinated by the signs, graffiti, and industrial buildings of Gowanus and Red Hook, the repeated elongated oval shape is derived from the brightly colored canoes and kayaks she observes on her daily waterfront walks.

Working simultaneously between canvases, she uses untraditional tools: palette knives, rollers, rags, spray bottles, and squeegees. Layers of translucent and impasto paint embellish the canvas with offbeat shapes, smears of bold color, patches of subtle tone, and painterly brushwork. Combining hybrid gestures and hard-edge color blocking, this process results in graphic networks drawing on traditions of the women of Abstract Expressionism, as well as contemporary works by Elizabeth Murray and Pia Fries.