On the second Friday of this August, the closing showcase for Five Below drew in art-fans under the last dregs of Summer’s heat. Hugged between buildings, the lingering heat dispersed into Marinaro Gallery on 86 Walker Street, notched into east Tribeca. The gallery housed paintings and mixed media works from twenty-five artists. Marinaro Gallery recently moved to this new space on the fourth floor in early July, and formed this show in collaboration with Loft Projects, a nomadic gallery highlighting “early career artists.”
Five Below featured paintings and 3D pieces from Cortney Andrews, Ophelia Arc, Lindsay Burke, Matthew Chambers, Melanie Delach, Michelle Doll, Anneke Eussen, Olivia Gossett Cooper, Charlotte Hailstone Wu, Emma Hapner, Ridley Howard, Anthony Iacono, Nicole James, Taylor Keister, Amy Liu, Alex Maceda, Sarah Alice Moran, Sunny Moxin Chen, Adi Oren, Anna Ortiz, Haejin Park, Cait Porter, MC Sparks, Aliza Stone Howard, Johannes VanDerBeek.
Quiet Lunch’s favorites included Charlotte Hailstone Wu’s trio of neon color planes on triangular canvases. As well as Johannes VanDerBeek’s nonrepresentational peach squiggle journey of acrylic on canvas. Along with Cait Porter and Aliza Stone Howard’s realistic paintings rendered in high chroma with a warm human touch. With a shoutout to Taylor Keister’s unexpected exploration of a hyperrealistic trinket shelf created with colored pencils, flashe, oil, and layered MDF.
But the three pieces we were admittedly most jazzed for belonged to Emma Hapner, Michelle Doll, and Olivia Gosset Cooper. Emma Hapner’s monochrome pink fantasy proceeded itself. Her work is highly consistent both in person and online, and what stood out the most in her contribution to Five Below was her thirteen tiny vignettes. Tiny being the operative word. Like gold-framed looking glasses onto her pink-laced vanity table. Lately her works have played with this petite but plentiful scale, rather than her enormous self portraits she is known for.
A bit more surprising was Doll’s two oil paintings. While, like Hapner’s they also felt like classic vignettes, these paintings were a notch away from what we’ve come to expect in the last stretch of this artist’s long career. Though Doll famously paints figurative portals into pure intimacy, her works for this show centered on a baby, which are becoming more common in the latest works from her. As well as a Sapphic couple caressing each other on a window sill, which is the first of its kind for this artist that we can recall at Quiet Lunch. Both paintings are as tenderly rendered as ever. In fact, we have an entire conversation with Michelle Doll exploring just that subject. Keep your eyes trained here for that peek into her studio.
Both Hapner and Doll however, still at their core delivered on their easily recognizable styles. It was Olivia Gosset Cooper who truly showcased something we failed to expect from her. Brand new abstract paintings that departed from the inventive found-object works focusing on the dynamics of the home displayed her series of the last few years. These strippy textured paintings were a wink into something new, but we won’t spoil the details for you, since we also have a long form Artist in Conversation piece releasing this week!
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