SHFAP presents Conduit, a two person exhibition with Daniel Herr and Beth Kaminstein. Herr is a Brooklyn based painter who received a Masters from Boston University. He will exhibit his painterly abstract-y paintings. Kaminstein shows recent non-utilitarian glazed ceramic sculpture. Both artists use a fluid pictorial language centered around color movement.

Beth Kaminstein has been making ceramics for 40 years. She started as a teen in Bergen County, NJ. She went to Bennington College where she studied with Stanley Rosen. She was partnered with the ceramicist Ron Levy for many years until Levy’s death in 2013. She and Levy both worked at Greenwich House in the 70s. In 1989 they moved to Islamorada in the Florida Keys where she set up a studio by the ocean. Her work has been shown in New York, Washington, D.C., Miami and Key West. Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post, described it as: “Shimmery and eccentrically beautiful, her work appears as much found as made.” In a review of a SHFAP group exhibition, Roberta Smith linked Kaminstein with others who “repurpose the seductive hues and open gestures of Color Field Painting.” Perhaps this is not far off track, as this Bennington graduate curated a show of paintings by Jules Olitski and Larry Poons, stemming from when they both worked near her in the Keys.  She employs local materials in her glazes and the giant open garage doors of he studio let the entirety of the tropical landscape into her work with clay.  Recently her large kiln suffered a punishing collapse that has led into  new fragmentary forms as part of her interest in draped forms.

Daniel Herr was born in California. His father is a landscape painter. After studying at U o C Davis, Herr received his MFA in painting from Boston University, when John Walker ran the program. Something of Walker’s vigorous handling is evident in Herr- though more comic, more ironic in Herr.  Herr’s work, can be seen as jumping off from abstract-expressionism and may be linked to painters such as Willem de Kooning, Don Van Vliet and Gerhard Richter.

The artist states:

“I like the idea that the picture can tell a story, even if not a beginning, middle, and end. It’s more like a title to a poem: it references something specific that the poem isn’t saying directly

In New York, you wake up and you always feel like you’re running late. 

The chaotic urban landscape of ugliness

Thinking about how people present themselves, what they want other people to know about them, what they don’t. I thought about what Bob Dylan said about folk music: if you wanted to know what was going on at a particular time in history, you’d look and see what the newspaper said. But if you wanted to know what was really going on, you’d listen to the folk songs. 

People’s profiles seem to suggest a hidden story, or a more genuine one.

The best paintings I’ve ever made are just ones that sort of painted themselves, and I don’t even remember how I did it.”

Herr has completed artist residencies around the world including the Molten Capital residency at Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, Estudio Nónmada in Barcelona, Spain, and the Artist Colony residency at the Inside–Out Art Museum in Beijing, China.

Herr and Kaminstein , have each found ways to build new cities in the landscape of painting from the 1950s on. Herr developing from Ab-Ex painting and Kaminstein from Color Field. In the process they each create their own bejeweled pictorial architecture.

Please contact Jamie or Steven at info@shfap.com or 917-861-7312 for further information or images.