SHFAP presents a group exhibition of painting entitled Shadows. The show presents shadows, in painting, to different effects. Shadows nail down space- are attached and detached to a figure. Shadows are also related to silhouettes where figures lose detail and become abstract forms, like keyholes in pictorial space. Shadows create false figures.

In Waiting by Bob Thompson, from 1958, Thompson’s everyman figure, bare headed at this point, stands in a patchwork environment before his reflection. There is a marvelous sense of this being simultaneously a block-y abstraction and an image of a figure. 1958 was a transitional moment for Thompson, who moved from the University of Louisville to Provincetown and then to New York’s Lower East Side.

Madeline Donahue’s paintings of mother and child display her deft painterly short hand and comic world view. Her work was exhibited at SHFAP last month in the solo exhibition, Attachments. In Silhouettes the mother and child protagonists of her painting are present only as shadows on a blank canvas. Madeline Donahue’s work was included in the 2019 Every Women Biennial, I Wanna Dance with Somebody.

Steven Harvey’s Galaxy of Love, 1990, comes from a series of paintings that are simultaneously figurative and abstract. It depicts figures having sex floating in inky blue space hovering between legibility and the liminal. The work was previously exhibited in a 1990 show, Figuring Eros, at the Newhouse Center in Snug Harbor, Staten Island.

Sangram Majumdar’s Self Portrait in Interior from 2011, is on loan from a private collection. It casts a giant shadow of the artists head into a room where what appears to be a mirror is in front of some windows. Majumdar’s work has recently been seen in exhibitions at Geary Contemporary and in a solo show at the Asia Society of Houston Texas, as well as Yard, SHFAP’s homegrown biennial in May 2019.

Giordanne Salley is becoming known for her intimate paeans to love in a wooded landscape. Her two new paintings Waves I & Waves II, depict single full size shadows in the water on separate canvases. The two canvases viewed together create a single image and yet exist separately as well. Salley’s work was seen this summer in the warehouse show SPF32 in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Gwen Strahle, a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design, is known for wonky metaphysical still lives. Her two paintings here are integrated by a figure both within and outside the scene. In Sleeping with my Still Life from 2006, the artist is represented as an almost colonial silhouette “sleeping” before a table of tools including a feather and mallet. Strahle had her last solo show, “New Paintings,” at Smith College in 2017.

This exhibition is a metaphysical show of images that hover on the edge of being there.

Please call 917-861-7312 or contact Lauren Fowler at lauren@shfap.com for more information or images. View available works on instagram @shfapselections.