Civil Union: Jenny Morgan and David Mramor
Dates:
Fri Nov 13, 2009 00:00 - Wed Oct 21, 2009
Civil Union: Jenny Morgan and David Mramor
November 13th - December 13th, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday November 13th 6-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: 8pm November 20th - reservations required
Like the Spice is pleased to present Civil Union, featuring the individual and collaborative works by Jenny Morgan and David Mramor. To someone encountering their individual works, Morgan's meticulously psychological portraits and Mramor's intuition driven photo/paintings would not appear so perfectly complimentary. And yet, once combined, they fit so precisely, each artist making the other stronger.
Morgan's portraits are tightly controlled photorealistic renderings of people known very well to the artist. She often scrapes away areas of the figures, revealing both the layers of technique and the metaphorical flesh of her subjects. Morgan's works are at the very pinnacle of planning, discipline, and control in the service of emotional clarity, tied quite specifically to the individuals she depicts.
Mramor's hybrid paintings are alchemical combinations of photography and painting. Reacting to digitally manipulated imagery printed onto canvas, Mramor "corrects" the images by adding layers of intuitive marks in many media, recently even including collage. The marks have a wild quality, seeming almost random at first encounter, but there is a deep formal intelligence and perverse beauty to Mramor's works; they are absolutely fearless.
Worked by each artist in several turns, the collaborative works are built in layers of intervention and invention. The Apollonian Morgan and Dionysian Mramor inform each other's input while respectfully resisting each other's positions. The artists talk of these collaborations as an exercise in trust, giving up personal ego and control, as well as a way to use each other as a tool, performing a partially-outsourced creative act.
Jenny and David met in graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York during the fall of 2006. Having studios next to each other, they found comfort in each other's artistic process, Morgan in the looseness of Mramors innate strokes and line, and David in Jenny's flat symbolic masterful portraits. After grad school they merged studios and while both working on their own paintings sporadically produced multiple collaborative works. "Both of our work has totally transformed as a result of that first collaborative piece we did, and continue to change with each piece we make together".
Jenny Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1982. She had her first solo show in New York at Like the Spice Gallery in January of 2009, and has exhibited nationwide in solo shows at the Plus Gallery and the Pirate Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Ms. Morgan has participated in group shows at Columbia University, The LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery, and multiple galleries in Colorado, Florida and New York City.
David Mramor was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio in 1984. Mramor has exhibited nation wide in group and solo exhibitions in such galleries as Massimo Audiello in New York City, Plus Gallery in Colorodo, and Texas Fire House in Queens NY. Both Jenny Morgan and David Mramor work at Marilyn Minter Studio and currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
November 13th - December 13th, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday November 13th 6-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: 8pm November 20th - reservations required
Like the Spice is pleased to present Civil Union, featuring the individual and collaborative works by Jenny Morgan and David Mramor. To someone encountering their individual works, Morgan's meticulously psychological portraits and Mramor's intuition driven photo/paintings would not appear so perfectly complimentary. And yet, once combined, they fit so precisely, each artist making the other stronger.
Morgan's portraits are tightly controlled photorealistic renderings of people known very well to the artist. She often scrapes away areas of the figures, revealing both the layers of technique and the metaphorical flesh of her subjects. Morgan's works are at the very pinnacle of planning, discipline, and control in the service of emotional clarity, tied quite specifically to the individuals she depicts.
Mramor's hybrid paintings are alchemical combinations of photography and painting. Reacting to digitally manipulated imagery printed onto canvas, Mramor "corrects" the images by adding layers of intuitive marks in many media, recently even including collage. The marks have a wild quality, seeming almost random at first encounter, but there is a deep formal intelligence and perverse beauty to Mramor's works; they are absolutely fearless.
Worked by each artist in several turns, the collaborative works are built in layers of intervention and invention. The Apollonian Morgan and Dionysian Mramor inform each other's input while respectfully resisting each other's positions. The artists talk of these collaborations as an exercise in trust, giving up personal ego and control, as well as a way to use each other as a tool, performing a partially-outsourced creative act.
Jenny and David met in graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York during the fall of 2006. Having studios next to each other, they found comfort in each other's artistic process, Morgan in the looseness of Mramors innate strokes and line, and David in Jenny's flat symbolic masterful portraits. After grad school they merged studios and while both working on their own paintings sporadically produced multiple collaborative works. "Both of our work has totally transformed as a result of that first collaborative piece we did, and continue to change with each piece we make together".
Jenny Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1982. She had her first solo show in New York at Like the Spice Gallery in January of 2009, and has exhibited nationwide in solo shows at the Plus Gallery and the Pirate Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Ms. Morgan has participated in group shows at Columbia University, The LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery, and multiple galleries in Colorado, Florida and New York City.
David Mramor was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio in 1984. Mramor has exhibited nation wide in group and solo exhibitions in such galleries as Massimo Audiello in New York City, Plus Gallery in Colorodo, and Texas Fire House in Queens NY. Both Jenny Morgan and David Mramor work at Marilyn Minter Studio and currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Dean Goelz: The Beaded Curtain
Dean Goelz: Beaded Curtain
October 9th - November 8th 2009
Opening Reception: October 9th 6:30-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: October 16th, 8pm - RSVP required

Like the Spice is pleased to present Dean Goelz: Beaded Curtain, an exhibition of the artist’s astoundingly magical works on paper and panel. Composed of fractal accretions of meticulously placed shiny white dots and tightly rendered faces and hands, the figures in Goelz’s works seem to manifest themselves face first from nothingness. Not quite delimited, more atmospheric than solid, these apparitions are between two worlds, present yet translucent.
Despite their delicate limbo, each figure is endowed with a strikingly detailed specificity. You can read the history of the characters between the fine lines of their faces and see the individual particularities of their dance-like gestures. These figures are very much a product of time. They exist in nothingness but came from a more solid world. This focus, however, does not mark the works as portraits; they are actually more archetypical and emotional than they are illustrative. Each character seems at once to be an individual and an everyman or everywoman.
Alone amid the void of unmarked backgrounds, each figure is left to struggle with their place. Orienting in nothingness leaves no choice but to look inward, living an ascetic silence. This stillness is reflected in the artist’s meditative approach to his gruelingly controlled and repetitive process. The time taken to complete each work requires a patience and love like that of a longtime relationship, committed, complex and mundanely miraculous. The web-like networks of dots, slowly unfurling over time, mark the hours of a life lived in art.
Dean Goelz graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. His work has shown nationally and internationally and is included in private collections in the US, France, and the Czech Republic. He lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This will be Dean Goelz’s second solo show at Like the Spice.
October 9th - November 8th 2009
Opening Reception: October 9th 6:30-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: October 16th, 8pm - RSVP required

Like the Spice is pleased to present Dean Goelz: Beaded Curtain, an exhibition of the artist’s astoundingly magical works on paper and panel. Composed of fractal accretions of meticulously placed shiny white dots and tightly rendered faces and hands, the figures in Goelz’s works seem to manifest themselves face first from nothingness. Not quite delimited, more atmospheric than solid, these apparitions are between two worlds, present yet translucent.
Despite their delicate limbo, each figure is endowed with a strikingly detailed specificity. You can read the history of the characters between the fine lines of their faces and see the individual particularities of their dance-like gestures. These figures are very much a product of time. They exist in nothingness but came from a more solid world. This focus, however, does not mark the works as portraits; they are actually more archetypical and emotional than they are illustrative. Each character seems at once to be an individual and an everyman or everywoman.
Alone amid the void of unmarked backgrounds, each figure is left to struggle with their place. Orienting in nothingness leaves no choice but to look inward, living an ascetic silence. This stillness is reflected in the artist’s meditative approach to his gruelingly controlled and repetitive process. The time taken to complete each work requires a patience and love like that of a longtime relationship, committed, complex and mundanely miraculous. The web-like networks of dots, slowly unfurling over time, mark the hours of a life lived in art.
Dean Goelz graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. His work has shown nationally and internationally and is included in private collections in the US, France, and the Czech Republic. He lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This will be Dean Goelz’s second solo show at Like the Spice.
Dean Goelz: The Beaded Curtain
Dates:
Fri Oct 09, 2009 00:00 - Sun Sep 27, 2009

Untitled (Beaded Curtain 11), Acrylic, latex, graphite on Panel, 2009
Dean's characters appear from the dotted background as though it were a transformative limbo, never knowing a beginning or an end, just an eternal continuation, like an elegant outsider. Join us on October 9th for opening night! Visit our website for more. likethespice.com
Fade: Eric LoPresti
Dates:
Fri Sep 11, 2009 00:00 - Sun Aug 16, 2009
Eric LoPresti: Fade
Sept 11th - October 5th 2009
Opening Reception Friday September 11th 6:30-10:00pm
Artist Dinner: September 18th 8:00pm, RSVP required.
Visit http://www.likethespice.com/fade/fadersvp/html to RSVP!
Like the Spice is proud to present Fade, its second solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Eric LoPresti. The works in Fade are predominated by the soft colors of the desert steppe - grays, ochres, pinks and dark blues. In contrast, the imagery is dramatic in scope and subject, including vast aerial views of fractured desert landscapes, nuclear test sites in Nevada, and explosions from undisclosed arid locations, many of which are based on photographs LoPresti took himself from the windows of chartered planes.
LoPresti’s work is about conflict. The works in Fade investigate the traumatic side effects of contemporary war through landscapes that are the sites of weapons tests, reactors, and munitions dumps. Building off of his previous diptychs which juxtaposed sites of violent conflict with colored gradient fields, LoPresti’s new works convey a post-cold-war zeitgeist with a confident hand and genuine devotion to the aesthetics of the austere. The new works seamlessly incorporates landscapes and gradients, opening up contemplative possibilities and heightening the effect of the vast spaces they depict. Rather than polemicize, LoPresti’s works provide space to encounter the drama and vastness of forces both within and beyond human control..
Eric LoPresti, born 1971, holds a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the recipient of the Faber Birren/Louis J. Kuriansky Foundation Award and the Miami Young Painters, William and Dorothy Yeck Purchase Award. Recent solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2005) at Jan Larsen Fine Art, New Thought New Work (2006), at Miami University, Force Against Force (2008) at Like the Spice, and Test Sites (2008) at the New York Public Library. LoPresti lives and works in Brooklyn.
Sept 11th - October 5th 2009
Opening Reception Friday September 11th 6:30-10:00pm
Artist Dinner: September 18th 8:00pm, RSVP required.
Visit http://www.likethespice.com/fade/fadersvp/html to RSVP!
Like the Spice is proud to present Fade, its second solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Eric LoPresti. The works in Fade are predominated by the soft colors of the desert steppe - grays, ochres, pinks and dark blues. In contrast, the imagery is dramatic in scope and subject, including vast aerial views of fractured desert landscapes, nuclear test sites in Nevada, and explosions from undisclosed arid locations, many of which are based on photographs LoPresti took himself from the windows of chartered planes.
LoPresti’s work is about conflict. The works in Fade investigate the traumatic side effects of contemporary war through landscapes that are the sites of weapons tests, reactors, and munitions dumps. Building off of his previous diptychs which juxtaposed sites of violent conflict with colored gradient fields, LoPresti’s new works convey a post-cold-war zeitgeist with a confident hand and genuine devotion to the aesthetics of the austere. The new works seamlessly incorporates landscapes and gradients, opening up contemplative possibilities and heightening the effect of the vast spaces they depict. Rather than polemicize, LoPresti’s works provide space to encounter the drama and vastness of forces both within and beyond human control..
Eric LoPresti, born 1971, holds a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is the recipient of the Faber Birren/Louis J. Kuriansky Foundation Award and the Miami Young Painters, William and Dorothy Yeck Purchase Award. Recent solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2005) at Jan Larsen Fine Art, New Thought New Work (2006), at Miami University, Force Against Force (2008) at Like the Spice, and Test Sites (2008) at the New York Public Library. LoPresti lives and works in Brooklyn.
Eric LoPresti: FADE
Dates:
Fri Sep 11, 2009 00:00 - Fri Aug 07, 2009
Like the Spice Gallery:
Eric LoPresti: Fade
Sept 11th - October 5th 2009
Opening Reception Friday September 11th 6:30-10:00pm
Artist Dinner: September 18th 8:00pm open to the public, RSVP required.
Fade, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Eric LoPresti, builds off of his previous diptychs depicting conflict in action, conveying a post-cold-war zeitgeist with a confident hand and genuine devotion to the aesthetics of the austere.
Alongside Fade will be a special lower level group show curated by artist, curator, and independent critic Michael Wilson.
Hours:Wed-Mon 12-7pm.
718.388.5388.
224 Roebling Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.likethespice.com
Eric LoPresti: Fade
Sept 11th - October 5th 2009
Opening Reception Friday September 11th 6:30-10:00pm
Artist Dinner: September 18th 8:00pm open to the public, RSVP required.
Fade, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based artist Eric LoPresti, builds off of his previous diptychs depicting conflict in action, conveying a post-cold-war zeitgeist with a confident hand and genuine devotion to the aesthetics of the austere.
Alongside Fade will be a special lower level group show curated by artist, curator, and independent critic Michael Wilson.
Hours:Wed-Mon 12-7pm.
718.388.5388.
224 Roebling Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.likethespice.com