ELIZABETH ATTERBURY, POPPY JONES,
ROSE NESTLER, SARAH PALMER,
HANA WARD, ROBERT ZEHNDER
Felix Art Fair

February 17 - 20, 2022

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
Los Angeles, California
Room 1124

 

Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce our participation in Felix Art Fair 2022, with works by Elizabeth Atterbury, Poppy Jones, Rose Nestler, Sarah Palmer, Hana Ward, and Robert Zehnder; on view at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California, February 17 - 20, 2022.

Ruminating on flora, the landscape and the familiar, this presentation brings together five artists from the gallery’s diverse programming, all of whom have recently exhibited or have upcoming engagements with Mrs. in the coming year.

When creating her new series of monotypes - a selection of which are on view here - Elizabeth Atterbury chose to eschew traditional processes in favor of cut paper and shaped embossments made from hand-cut copper plates. These embossed shapes spring forth from the artist’s life and history - her kids’ drawings, Chinese calligraphy practice paper, negative shapes discovered while cutting the plates themselves. The contours leave a shadow, like an empty chair - as much about what is there as what is missing.

In a similar distillation of familiar sights from the home, Poppy Jones renders fragments of domestic life in unfamiliar close-up. From daffodils cut and suspended in a water glass, to a time-worn down blanket, the artist uses one-off printing and photographic processes to indelibly imprint passing moments in time onto surfaces common to clothing, such as up-cycled suede, leather and silk.

Rose Nestler often recreates historical artworks as a means of questioning the shackles of patriarchy and its effects on the appropriation of the female figure. Here, leather gloves clasp a bunch of flowers (‘Sottobosco’ bouquet after Rachel Ruysch); a monochrome memento mori that draws inspiration from delicate floral depictions by Dutch painter Rachel Ruysch, whose career boomed during the tulip mania of the 17th century. Meanwhile, Nestler’s video work centers around a barre class run off the rails, in which a group perform a manic routine of balletic arm gestures, leg lifts and pelvic thrusts.

In Sarah Palmer’s works, feminine bodies are chaotically juxtaposed with textures of rugs, baroque beds, and heavy drapery, in often surreal and reimagined contexts.  Considering the poetry of H.D. and Emily Dickinson, the “textual” spaces created between these images act like language, creating veins of communication and conversation.

Robert Zehnder’s paintings and drawings of undulating landscapes, by contrast, are devoid of human subjects. The earth becomes the protagonist in these compositions, and the depicted environments have succumbed to the effects of industrial civilization.

Hana Ward’s stoneware vessel, titled Seedsaver, suggests that not only does this object contain the genesis for a bountiful crop, but also the magic and tradition held within the practice of farming of the earth.  Ward considers what it might mean to embrace the “fertile void”, a space of obscurity before transformation.

A dance of flatness and depth flows through this arrangement, as dimensionality expands and contracts back into a tight picture plane. 

For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.