Jochen Hempel Gallery is proud to announce their gallery exchange with Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

After a successful exchange of our artists in New Orleans earlier this year we will show a selected group of artists from New Orleans in our Berlin gallery space.

During our stay in New Orleans we had the great chance to meet a few of the artists in their studios and to made a good selection together with the team of Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.

The Berlin installation of EXCHANGE features the work of Margaret Evangeline, Bonnie Maygarden, Adam Mysock, Nikki Rosato, Marna Shopoff, Sidonie Villere and Paul Villinski. The exhibition will open Friday 24 June and run through Saturday 3o July 2016.

MARGARET EVANGELINE [New York, NY ::: b.1943 – Baton Rouge, LA] is a contemporary painter, sculptor, and installation artist who lives and works in New York City. She was the first female recipient of an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans in 1978. Shortly thereafter, she began exhibiting at Galerie Simonne Stern and teaching at Delgado Community College, where she pioneered the school’s first fine arts program. It was during this time that Evangeline’s interest in using unconventional and aesthetically resistant materials emerged in her painting, a technique that has come to define her formal practice. Evangeline began creating large-scale abstract oil paintings on canvas, layering crystallina, flocking, and other cultural detritus with her oil paints. Working during the Persian Gulf War, Evangeline created a body of paintings that were intended as a response to the political turmoil internationally at hand, and the social issues particular to the environment of New Orleans. These works were the first in a long line of paintings and sculpture that Evangeline created to reflect on the cultural climate of our times.

BONNIE MAYGARDEN is a multimedia artist who received her MFA in Studio Arts from Tulane University. The destruction of Hurricane Katrina caused her to take leave of New Orleans to further pursue art. She attended Pratt Institute in New York, where she received her Bachelor‘s of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in exhibitions both nationally and internationally in various museums, galleries and alternative venues.

I create paintings without the aid of technology, yet I am interested in making works that are informed by and react to a culture defined by a digital experience. My work references familiar technology-created images, such as photography, x-rays, or Photoshop filters, yet are created only using the meticulous illusion of paint. Through referencing the digital image I am able to make paintings that walk the line between something and nothing, that both play to our expectations of the disposable contemporary image and the valued tradition of the handmade.

ADAM MYSOCK was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1983 – the son of an elementary school English teacher and a lab technician who specializes in the manufacturing of pigments. On account of a steady stream of folk

tales from his mother, his father‘s vividly dyed work clothes, and a solid Midwestern work ethic, he developed an interest in painting and drawing all things Americana from a very early age. Mysock earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Art History by 2004 from Tulane University. He then received an MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I create paintings without the aid of technology, yet I am interested in making works that are informed by and react to a culture defined by a digital experience. My work references familiar technology-created images, such as photography, x-rays, or Photoshop filters, yet are created only using the meticulous illusion of paint. Through referencing the digital image I am able to make paintings that walk the line between something and nothing, that both play to our expectations of the disposable contemporary image and the valued tradition of the handmade.

I’m a revisionist history painter. Rather than rewrite the narrative of the past to justify an ideology, I repaint yesterday’s imagery in order to rationalize our present circumstances.

NIKKI ROSATO earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2013. Prior to studying at SMFA, Rosato received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Pittsburgh.

The visual aspects of a road map are remarkably human. A map is a symbol of a living, breathing, moving body—the land is just as alive as we are. A map’s lines carve the pathways for the rhythms and movements that undulate across the surface of the earth. As we move though life, the places we inhabit and the people that we meet alter and shape us into the person that we are in the present day. I am interested in the idea that a place I visited as a child has affected the outcome of the person that I am today. In the Merged series I’m exploring the duality of human existence and experience. Humans are multifaceted and are constantly affected by pathways traveled. Within one body lies experience in both positivity and negativity – interconnected forces that we continually confront in order to achieve balance. As we strive to become the best version of ourselves, we seek a sense of symmetry; however, the symmetry in this work is handcrafted and therefore an impossible attempt at perfection.

MARNA SHOPOFF blends contemporary with classical approaches to art and spatial relationships. Shopoff received her Bachelors in Fine Arts (2012) and Masters in Fine Arts (2014) from Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, IN, with a concentration in painting and drawing.

My work is a vehicle to investigate the perceptual intimacy I find within public spaces. Blending contemporary with classical approaches to art and spatial relationships, I use the idea of perception as a function of human experience, place and personal memory. I explore how art can become a space by its interaction with the environment and how the space can become the artwork. Blending the philosophies of architecture with abstraction, architecture becomes both a visual and physical bridge between inside and out, a passageway of self-reflection, while abstraction is a way to move through a space. I explore compositional, personal and experiential connections while creating an invitation for the viewer to do the same. Conceptualizing ideas relating to place identity and lived experiences within the built environment, my largescale paintings become an extension of my identity. The suggested architectural elements become a metaphoric voice, representing the temporality of my human condition, while teetering between the realms of public and private, intimacy and distance. I am interested in spatial relationships that capture an essence of a place, how we move through a space in the world and within a piece of art. My work explores whether, through art, we can share our individual perceptions, whether someone can access and experience a new view of the world through my artwork and how I can create a new space via my art.

SIDONIE VILLERE has a BFA in Ceramics from The Newcomb School of Art at Tulane University and an MFA in Ceramics from The University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Villere is a multi-faceted artist using self-preservation and its contradictions as a common theme in her work. As a sculptor, her ceramic works often use geology to shape metaphorical self-portraits. As a painter, her ethereal works use multiple mediums to achieve layering and subtle depth that produce a painterly effect but maintain a sculptural aesthetic.

I believe our purpose is to connect. I also believe we cannot connect without being vulnerable. With my work I rely on contradictions spurred by self-preservation. Through my sculptures, this exploration visually relies on referencing human and geological processes; both giving surface and form to my emotional expressions. The pieces are born through revealing and concealing, intentionally and intuitively making the emotional physical. They are architectural versus geological, destroying versus repairing, protected versus exposed. Creating these self-portraits with three dimensional, abstract, ceramic sculptures and multi-media paintings I am able to edit these dichotomies so that the viewer is left with a minimal physicality and an overall mood.

PAUL VILLINSKI has created studio and large-scale artworks for more than three decades. Villinski was born in York, Maine, USA, in 1960, son of an Air Force navigator. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. A scenic route through the educational system included stops at Phillips Exeter Academy and the Massachusetts College of Art, and a BFA with honors from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1984.

www.jonathanferraragallery.com