L. BRANDON KRALL

Sui Generis

L. Brandon Krall (b.1955) is a conceptualist whose oeuvre ranges from the early Alphabetic Equivalents series of mixes media paintings and works on paper to Altered Reproduction and Captioned drawing, the Wheels for Walking and Doors sculpture series and Installations including, Vanity of the Soul: Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board. Following the Alphabet series the TRIGRAMS paintings of the 1990s culminated in the HEXAGRAMS paintings executed in mixed media and presented in a variety of installations. 

Krall Curated numerous artist film series in the 1980-90s, Jonas Mekas photography and WORD in Houston, Texas. She has exhibited her works in galleries through 2019 and developed the video-art series, LIT. FIG. the literal + the figurative which included an evening at the Emily Harvey Gallery. CHANGEchance: The Duchamp Paradigm are essays of over 10 years work and can be found at http://www.untitled-enterprises.net/changechance They are the grey matter of art history; their physical realization is planned for an environment, PERPETUUMmobile: Enchanted Domain. 

This exhibition will combine her work from the eighties with sculptural Objets, after the artists of the early Twentieth century. Moving to New York and taking a raw loft in the 80s Krall’s painting evolved from a combined abstract landscape into an invented alphabet of paired geometric forms. This enabled her to paint as she wished using ideas, Japanese, English, Latin or Greek concepts to generate ideas. These works use a literally, abstract language. A number of ready-made sculptures will be exhibited along with the Alphabet paintings. 

SANGRAM MAJUMDAR

insidegardens

In our rear gallery, SHFAP presents an exhibition of paintings by Sangram Majumdar titled insidegardens. This show includes a significant earlier work from 2006, Built to Spill, along with works from 2011-15. They can be seen to presage his recent works where abstraction is intermingled with fleeting elements of representation.  In Built to Spill he creates almost a cubist observational painting by focusing on shards of broken chairs. In Paper Re-positioned, he paints a typhoon of cut paper pieces lying on top of a landscape image.

Majumdar first showed with SHFAP in 2009.  The current exhibition of seven works is Majumdar’s 5^th at the gallery. It touches on his profound approach to perceptual painting. Majumdar’s interest is in exploring the hidden, the peripheral, and the in-between. The paintings purposely resist direct interpretation, inviting us to slow down, embrace ambiguity, and trust our senses.

Majumdar was born in Kolkata and moved to the United States when he was 9 year old. His journey across international lines at a young age is reflected in his work, which involves hybrid states, synthesis and transformation. 

John Yau wrote about Majumdar’s work “ It seems to me that Majumdar is after that moment of seeing which occurs just before we name the object, event or experience and begin looking for the next thing, whatever it is,” Yau adds, “I see this as a risky gambit as well as a conscious challenge to a media-besotted world that revels in names and naming, as if somehow everything can be accounted for, safely categorized and subsequently copied.”

Majumdar has been a Professor of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2003. In 2017, he had a survey exhibition at Asia Society Texas Center in Houston, Texas. He will join the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle this year. Please contact Steven or Jamie at 917-861-7312 or info@shfap.com for more information or images.