EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present Make-Up Brush, Denise Kupferschmidt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and the first dedicated entirely to her painting practice. A new series of works on canvas comprise the show, parlaying the content and graphic visual style of her ink drawings and murals into colorful meanderings. In these paintings her signature figures are accompanied by abstracted imagery, culled from moments of intrigue found in the ordinary and overlooked environments of New York, as well as similar moments found in piles of drawings in the studio. Kupferschmdit draws on advertising, architecture and design elements from other eras and motifs found in her own work that echo that half-forgotten past.
The gallery takes on a stage like landscape, filled with painted figures in various states of embodiment and extrapolated wrought iron windows. Decidedly feminine, the painted figures’ broad, distorted shoulders indicate strength, yet, at times deprived of hands, feet, and faces, their mobility is limited. Their iconic, central poses echo advertising where subject dominates the foreground in a flattened world of disposable backgrounds. The larger works approach life-size, and while painting them Kupferschmidt is physically forced to compare her body shape to theirs. A parallel is implied to the effects of marketed beauty standards upon women–an endless loop of desire and unattainability. The window paintings also nod to desire. These works use the motifs and patterns of wrought iron window grates found in Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods. Similarly beautiful, elegant and stylish, these modernist patterns serve an exclusionary function as well as aesthetic purpose.
Denise Kupferschmidt received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey McKay Gallery and Coooper Cole Gallery, Toronto. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Nicole Klagsbrun, Eleven Rivington and Tracey Williams, NY; The Brooklyn Academy of Music and Southfirst; Brooklyn; amongst others. She was an organizer of the itinerant group-show series ”Apartment Show”, has been included in Modern Painters 100 Artists to Watch and was a 2010 NADA Emerging Artist. Kupferschmidt is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.