Languages connect us.

 SHFAP presents Rosaire Appel’s Abstract Comics in our front gallery space. Born in New York, Rosaire Appel is a text-image artist working with interconnections among reading, looking and listening. Her long-standing explorations of asemic mark-making (writing which has no semantic value) takes form in drawings, prints, photographs and books. The artist describes her works as “ferries that attempt to cross vast and changeable rivers that exist between you reading/looking and me with pen in hand writing/drawing.”

Appel’s practice of mark-making developed from an obsession with writing and reading and a reckoning with the often problematic and insufficient nature of words. Recently, instances of listening to ambient noise have been incorporated into her mark-making. Abstract comics are a narrative device which use sequential imaging not as a constraint or formula but as an invitation to openness. Appel says, “Abstract comics allow me to explore architectures of situations without adding furniture." Her comics invite engagement and interpretation without offering solutions. The simplified shapes and color hint at familiar structures and alphabets yet remain malleable.

In his book, Asemic: The Art of Writing, Peter Schwenger situates Appel in a tradition of both ancient and contemporary works, citing a legacy of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida – who first associated with the term “asemic” – Henri Michaux, Cy Twombly, Christopher Skinner, anne rawlings, and visual poets Jim Leftwich and Tim Gaze, among others. Schwenger praises the asemic as a form of resistance to any kind of dictation over language or thought, and a provocation to exploration and individuation.

 Appel’s asemic scores were exhibited at Scholes Street Studios in Brooklyn in 2019. Her works have recently appeared in group shows at Idol Wild Gallery (Los Angeles, CA.) Underdonk Gallery (Brooklyn), and Pim Piet Fine Art ( The Hague, Netherlands) and Salon Zurcher (2021). She has published many books of visual poetry and abstract comics that are available for purchase at Printed Matter (NYC) and via Amazon. A selection of her artist’s books can be found at Central Booking Gallery. Her most recent publication is Voices Pending (2023), an anthology of her abstract comics which have appeared in magazines and journals. This is Rosaire Appel’s first time showing with steven harvey fine art projects.

In our rear gallery space, SHFAP presents works by Kurt Knoblesdorf in an exhibition entitled Found Objects. 

Knobelsdorf was born in Detroit, Michigan and grew up along Florida’s Gulf Coast. He studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was the recipient of several awards, and then became friends with E.M. Saniga, who also shows with SHFAP. Knobelsdorf is a painter of altered realities, working from architecture, landscape, figures from life, his own photography and found imagery. His subject matter reveals a profound sympathy for the undercurrents in American life, he seems to adore his cast of characters – the children, old people, strippers and salesmen who inhabit his paintings. His work reflects hard-lived experience, the potency of images, and the radical ability of painterly facture to deliver visual information. 

John Yau described the emotional core of Knobelsdorf’s work in a review for the Brooklyn Rail, writing “no matter who we are, some part of us remains anonymous and unfathomable, both to others and ourselves… The loneliness that haunts the paintings is not personal but collective and, more disturbingly, it feels unavoidable.” Knobelsdorf has found a way to make ‘handmade’ painting urgent, outrageous and essential. As Yau puts it, he has “raised genre painting to another level.”

Knobelsdorf has been the recipient of the Angelo Pinto Memorial Prize for Experimental Work, the Eleanor S. Gray Prize for Still Life, and two time recipient of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Annual Student Exhibition. His work has been shown by SHFAP many times, including in group shows with Sangram Majumdar and Ernie Saniga, and solo shows in 2009, 2010, and 2014. He has also shown work at Gallery Schlesinger in New York, Cando Arts in Miami, FL, and throughout Pennsylvania. Knobelsdorf has also regularly taught painting in Europe, working with Israel Herschberg in Italy and Jerusalem.