All over the moon: Laurel Sparks, Lily Stockman, Richard Tinkler. Curated by Jack Pierson

Cheim & Read is pleased to present All over the moon curated by Jack Pierson, an exhibition showcasing the work of three abstract painters: Laurel Sparks, Lily Stockman, and Richard Tinkler. The show opens on Thursday, July 12, and runs through August 30.

The paintings of Sparks, Stockman, and Tinkler offer a fresh, earthy take on geometric and pattern painting, in which clear, elemental, and at times idiosyncratic forms emerge from a dialogue between intuition and rigor. Each artist will display his or her work in a separate gallery space, offering viewers a detailed experience of its scope and vitality.

Laurel Sparks uses mediums as diverse as acrylic, gouache, papier-mâché, ash, woven canvas, gold leaf, glitter, bells, rocks, beads, and crayon in a single painting. Her compositions are dominated by fractured patterns executed with an off-handed spontaneity, in which her forcefully tactile materials, alternately gritty and luminous, speak to an interest in glyphs and talismans. Her work has been featured in solo shows at the Kate Werble Gallery in New York, and in group exhibitions at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York; the Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; D’Amelio Terras, New York, and elsewhere.

Lily Stockman studied painting and botany at Harvard University; completed an apprenticeship in Buddhist thanga painting in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and studied pigment and Mughal miniature painting in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. Her works are comprised of simple forms — U-shapes, inverted L’s, lozenges, circles — floating within a symmetrical, contained space, and painted in sometimes muted, sometimes hot neon color. And yet their simplicity is deceptive: close viewing reveals that solid bands of color are composed of painterly brushstrokes over sensually pigmented fields. Stockman’s paintings have been shown at Charles Moffett Gallery and Joe Sheftel Gallery in New York, and at Regen Projects, Luis De Jesus, and Gavlak in Los Angeles.

Richard Tinkler’s intricately woven, boldly symmetrical abstractions are painted in a single day, wet into wet. His richly colored patterns pulse with long, loose brushstrokes that push the boundaries of freedom within constraint. Despite the apparent symmetry of his compositions, nothing in the work is repeated: shapes are reiterated but never the same size; each brushstroke varies from the next; and colors attain unexpected tints from the wet paint underneath. Tinkler’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at 56 Henry, New York, and Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in group shows at Anton Kern, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; University of Nevada, Reno; Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris; and Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy.

About the curator: Jack Pierson is an artist working across a number of mediums, including sculpture, photography, video, installations, drawings, and artist’s books — works that are moored by melancholy and introspection, yet buoyed by a celebratory aura of seduction and glamour. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been held at the Aspen Art Museum and at CAC Malaga, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions worldwide. He lives and works in New York.