Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in Untitled Art Miami Beach. Visit us in booth A27 to see works by Joe Fig, Julian V.L. Gaines, Malia Jensen, Alois Kronschlaeger, Shaun Leonardo, Maureen O'Leary, Dread Scott, Mark Sengbusch, Jorge Tacla, and John Wood and Paul Harrison. We are also delighted to present El Patio (1988), a historic, large-scale installation by Judy Pfaff, on view in booth 6 of the Untitled Special Project section. The fair opens with a VIP preview on Tuesday, December 3rd, and continues through Sunday, December 8th.
This presentation incorporates a two-pronged curatorial approach. The first explores figuration and appropriation. New paintings by Joe Fig and Julian V.L. Gaines blend ideas and techniques from other artists to create thought-provoking results. Joe Fig paints exhibitions he has visited, creating near-verisimilitudes of the artworks and visitors he sees in his Contemplation series. These paintings display intricate details, from the artwork, to its reflection on the floor, to visitors' clothing and introspective poses. Julian V.L. Gaines's new paintings also highlight representation and the use of borrowed elements. Inspired by Jet magazine—which has been spotlighting Black news and culture since 1951—Gaines repaints vintage covers to celebrate the beauty of his subjects as icons while preserving key aspects of Black culture.
The second major theme focuses on texture and tactility; featuring sculptures and paintings that are stylistically and materially diverse and demonstrate a marked interest in the treatment of their surfaces. Interested in the emotional content of everyday scenes rather than strict realism, Maureen O’Leary’s paintings are known for loose, expressive brushwork and an experimental use of color. In the painting From the Octopus to the Rain Forest, her narrow canvas emphasizes the serpentine beauty of the coastal Puerto Rican landscape divided by a tangle of paved roads and utility buildings. Alois Kronschlaeger’s approach to color, on the other hand, is inspired by colorists like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto. The artist mixes his own paints and interference inks and applies them to unprimed canvases using eyedroppers, yielding colorful abstract grids with clear lines and soft edges.
Mark Sengbusch further expands the study of abstract form and tactility by creating modular sculptures from flat aluminum pieces that fit together to form three-dimensional shapes. These assembled forms evoke a sense of utopian and futuristic architecture, referencing his interests in handmade toys, Japanese wood joinery, Brutalist architecture, and science fiction. Conversely, Malia Jensen’s bronze and ceramic sculptures delve into themes of vulnerability and connection through animal symbolism. A twisted mass of snakes reflects our fears, while a life-size woodpecker surrounded by tiny holes hints at our desire to communicate. In today's polarized environment, these works invite us to ponder whether true connection is still possible.
This presentation brings together emerging and established artists representing a diversity of ages, geographic locations, and interests, underscoring their conceptual grounding. From intricate paintings to sculptural installations, these works invite viewers to reflect on identity, representation, connection, and materiality.
Joe Fig (b. 1968, Seaford, NY) has produced a diverse body of work encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and drawing, in which he examines the role of the artist, the creative process, and the self-made universe of the artist's studio. His work has been exhibited at the Dayton Art Institute, Sarasota Art Museum, Orlando Museum of Art, Chazen Museum of Art, Fleming Museum, Bass Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Norton Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, and New Britain Museum of American Art. Numerous institutions hold his work in their collections, including the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Chazen Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Hood Museum of Art, Library of Congress, New Britain Museum of American Art, and New York Public Library. Fig is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Inside the Artist's Studio (2015) and Inside the Painter's Studio (2009). He is the Department Chair of both Fine Arts and Visual Studies at Ringling College of Art + Design. His studio is located in Florida.
Julian V.L. Gaines (b. 1991, Chicago, IL) is a conceptual, multidisciplinary, installation artist. Pulling from multiple references ranging from life in Oregon to music and books, Gaines’ artistic practice repaints history in oil and house paint, embodying the social mores and principles he preaches daily. His work has progressed to a larger scale of depth and social commentary, intending to be both critical and constructive. This is best exemplified through projects released under Gaines’ independent creative company, “Ju Working on Projects™️.” His “For Creatives, By Creatives” initiative and “Game Worn” campaign produced four signature shoes with Nike Sportswear, whose 2018 release in Chicago and subsequent proceeds funded 500 scholarships for creatives in his childhood Chicago community. Gaines' work has been exhibited in Portland, New York, Miami, and Chicago, among other cities. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections, including the Portland Art Museum, The Schultz Family Foundation, Nike World Headquarters, and Soho House. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, HYPEBEAST, and The New Yorker, leading to notable brand partnerships with Nike, NFL, Jordan, Maker’s Mark, McDonald’s, Jet Life Recordings, Kiwi, Levi Strauss & Co., and more. His studio is located outside of Portland, OR.
Malia Jensen (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI) is known primarily for her work in sculpture and video. Jensen draws inspiration from the natural world and the complex relationships we negotiate within it. Her technically accomplished work marries the tactile authority of the hand-made with complex psychological narratives and a genuine quest for harmony and understanding. She has exhibited at The Schneider Museum of Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Holter Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Mesa Arts Center. Her work can be found in many public and private collections nationally and throughout the Northwest, including the Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, 21C Museum & Hotels, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, and Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Yucca Valley Materials Lab, and the Portland Garment Factory. Jensen has been a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Whitman College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has mentored students at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Portland, OR.
Alois Kronschlaeger’s (b. 1966, Grieskirchen, Austria) work exists at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. The artist is best known for his site-specific installations and sculptures, which demonstrate a preoccupation with environment and light and an interest in exploring time and space via geometry. He has exhibited at international institutions and festivals, such as The Figge Art Museum, The Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, Yuan Art Museum, MAC Lima, Islamic Arts Festival, and MOCA Tucson, where he constructed a 10,000 square foot installation of a “mountain range” inside the museum’s Great Hall. Over the past decade, he has produced five site-specific public installations with the art space SiTE:LAB, including Spire, which stretched over three stories tall, and Hybrid Structures, a series of ramps that connected various abandoned buildings on a deconsecrated Catholic church campus in Grand Rapids. Kronschlaeger works in Brooklyn, NY, and Mexico City.
Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. His performance practice, anchored by his work in Assembly—a diversion program for system-impacted youth at the arts nonprofit Recess, where he is Co-Director—is participatory and invested in the process of embodiment. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and received support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass. His work has been featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, the High Line, and the New Museum, and profiled in The New York Times and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was presented at MICA, MASS MoCA, and The Bronx Museum. And his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, in the fall of 2021. The artist has a studio in Brooklyn, NY.
Maureen O'Leary's (b. 1965, Washington, DC) paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. O'Leary's work has been exhibited at the Custom House in Westport, Ireland, Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Midwest Center for Photography, Artspace, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, Meadows Gallery - University of Texas at Tyler, and more. She is the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council - Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant and the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship from the Fondation des États-Unis. O'Leary has published four books: By The Same Sea, Homes of The Irish Diaspora (2023), Record (2021), Belle Mort (2013, Paper Chase Press) and Look/Listen (2010, Look/Listen Press). Her work is held in the collections of the Fondation des États-Unis and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. She has studios in Long Island, NY and Puerto Rico.
Judy Pfaff (b. 1946, London, UK) received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis (1971), and an MFA from Yale University (1973) where she studied with Al Held. Referenced by critics as a pioneer of installation art, this oft-cited label for the sprawling career of Pfaff provides an introductory sense of her legacy but proves limiting to the ever-changing work she has been making for decades and still today. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation, but is perhaps best described as painting in space. These spatial paintings inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist. Drawing upon a wealth of spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, Pfaff’s installations simultaneously and without contradiction reference the austerity of a cathedral and the temporality of a mandala. Like a mandala, the life of Pfaff’s work is brief and burning, deconstructed and sections discarded after a show comes down. Each installation considers the specific spatial geometries of the room, the ceiling, the street out the window, so that no two shows are ever alike. This tenacious generosity Pfaff offers her viewers, in which she and her crew labor for months or years for shows that last days or weeks, sets Pfaff apart from colleagues in other disciplines who can rely on sales of discrete objects. Refusing to give narrative meaning to her work, this urgent and ferocious need to labor for the visual and tactile is remarkable in an era where language dominates artistic activity. She exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987, and represented the United States in the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. Her pieces reside in the permanent collections of MOMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She is the recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenhiem Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
Dread Scott (b. 1965, Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist who for three decades has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine the cohering ideals of American society. His art has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, CAM St. Louis, Whitney Museum of American Art, African American Museum, Bruce Museum, CAM Houston, Worcester Art Museum, Pratt Munson, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Kunsthal KAdE, among others. It is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery, New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Ackland Art Museum, Pratt Munson, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Worcester Art Museum. Scott was recently awarded the prestigious Abigail Cohen Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and previously received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, and Creative Capital Foundation Grant. His studio is in Brooklyn, NY.
Mark Sengbusch’s (b. 1979, Ravenna, OH) recent shows include a group exhibition at The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, OR and a solo exhibition at Marvin Gardens Annex in Ridgewood, NY. He received his MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. He has participated in residencies at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and Vermont Studio Center. He has exhibited with Bushwick’s Transmitter Gallery, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklym, Real Tinsel Gallery in Milwaukee, David Klein Gallery in Detroit, Hilde in Los Angeles, and K&L Museum in Seoul. Sengbusch lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Jorge Tacla (b. 1958, Santiago, Chile) studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile in Santiago and moved to New York in 1981. Since then, Tacla’s paintings have been exhibited internationally in museums, biennials, and galleries. Notable exhibitions include: Jorge Tacla: Historia Natural de la Destrucción, Il Posto; El Cuarto Mundo, 14 Bienal de Artes Mediales de Chile, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; The Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility, USF Contemporary Art Museum; Jorge Tacla: Todo lo sólido se desvanece, CorpArtes; Upheaval, Tufts University Art Gallery; Hidden Identities: Paintings and Drawings by Jorge Tacla, Art Museum of the Americas; Jorge Tacla: Identidades Ocultas, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos; The Emergency Pavilion, 55 Biennale di Venezia; Jorge Tacla: Drawings, Milwaukee Art Museum, Jorge Tacla: Epicentro, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Jorge Tacla: Epicentro, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Jorge Tacla: Art at the Edge, High Museum of Art; The New Portrait, MoMA PS1. He has also completed several permanent installations including a mixed-media mural at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile and murals for the Bronx Housing Court, a division of the Civil Court of New York City. Tacla’s work is held in, among others, the collections of Tufts University, Wake Forest University, High Museum of Art, Museo de Arte Moderno, Blanton Museum of Art, California Center for the Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art acquired the papers of Jorge Tacla, including his drawings, correspondence, photographs, notebooks, and clippings. His holdings span nearly forty years and provide a look into the fluctuating histories of the New York and Santiago art worlds. Tacla lives and works in New York City and Santiago, Chile.
John Wood (b. 1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b. 1966, Wolverhampton) make single-channel videos, multi-screen video installations, paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures that elegantly fuse advanced aesthetic research with existential comedy. The artists’ spare, to-the-point works feature the actions of their own bodies, a wide variety of static and moving props, or combinations of both to illustrate the triumphs and tribulations of making art and having a life. The videos maintain a strict internal logic, with the action directly related to the duration of the work. Inside this "logical world," action is allowed to happen for no apparent reason, tensions build between the environment and its inhabitants, play is encouraged, and the influences on the work are intentionally mixed. In their not- always-successful experiments with movement and materials, many of which critic Tom Lubbock has described as “sculptural pratfalls,” Wood and Harrison employ exuberant invention, subtle slapstick, and a touch of light-hearted melancholy to reveal the inspiration and perspiration—as well as the occasional hint of desperation—behind all creative acts. Wood and Harrison met in 1989 at the Bath College of Higher Education and have worked together since 1993. Their studio is located in Bristol, UK.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located on The Bowery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Its program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement is central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).
