4 Artists

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce the group exhibition 4 Artists. Originated in 2012, this is the seventh installment in our 4 Artist series which spotlights artists at the beginning of their careers.

Dustin Emory (b.1999, Atlanta, GA) will exhibit paintings that draw from the isolation of
the 2020 pandemic as well as from his father’s ongoing incarceration. Emory’s work largely explores the human response to confinement through a black and white lens. His monochromatic palette underscores the theme of imprisonment, as does his repetition of subjects and surroundings. He also employs the formal and stylistic devices of surrealist film and photography, achieving an eerie depiction of man’s limited/restricted existence within the mundane.

Claire HarnEnz (b.1994, Madison, WI) paints horses straining under the tension of labor. In her monochromatic paintings, she creates a world that feels pressurized. Her horses, often spliced into scenes of empty strip malls and defunct department stores, act as a record of our current moment– a moment marked by the struggle over the ephemeral and material, the artificial and authentic. Horses have been used as symbols of freedom and accessories to power throughout art history. Yet, they are prey animals and beasts of burden, unaware of the history they carry on their backs. HarnEnz grew up with horses in Wisconsin and worked with them as a wrangler in Yellowstone National Park. For her, they were fellow laborers, coworkers, and friends. Intimately familiar with their contradictions as a symbol versus their reality, she crops, mirrors, and fragments them into representations that underscore the complex tensions of today.

Alex Leav’s (b.1997, New York, NY) abstract paintings revisit the de Kooning ur-woman to reflect on the representation of female identity in our social-media, image-based culture and the hybridization that characterizes much of our contemporary lives. Using traditional notions of gestural abstraction, Leav contours her shapes into ambiguous anatomies. The overall abstract form is then placed on top of a single high heeled shoe-- an iconic symbol of female power as well as female subjugation—further muddying the distinction between the individual and the collective, between the intellectual and the emotional.

Louisa Owen (b.1994, Los Angeles, CA) makes sculptures and drawings mounted on board that explore the sensibilities of loss and heightened levels of visibility that fluctuate in the wake of sudden absence. She examines vacancy and the worlds we choose to rebuild in its place. In her intricate and mysterious work, these spaces can house simultaneous moments of beauty and sadness, fear and comfort. For Owen, these states of being can exist on the surface, strong and overwhelming, or they can remain hidden, embedded in pockets inaccessible and unknown. Assembling meaning out of grief's ongoing complexities, Owen contemplates the imagined spaces of what’s left behind, and the reality that we, too, will someday leave behind.

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Dustin Emory, Claire HarnEnz, Alex Leav, and Louisa Owen

June 27 – July 26, 2024

Press Release