Paradise Lost and Found was the theme of this 14th iteration of SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. The fair’s founders, Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, selected Molesky’s series of banana works, collectively called Prone to Bruise, for an Artist Solo Spotlight. On the 10th floor of the office building at 75 Varick Street, the curators placed about 300 artists into various repurposed workspaces.

At Booth D2, Molesky’s solo exhibition consisted of 24 original oil paintings and an edition of risograph prints that will be available on the fair’s website until August 1st.

Photos by Samuel Morgan Photography, SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York 2025

Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct. 24, 5–7 PM

Gallery Talk: Thursday, Oct. 24, 6 PM

Coffee Talk: Wednesday, Oct. 30th, 4–6 PM

Workshops: Saturday, Oct. 26 & Nov. 2, 10 AM–4 PM

“Many of my earliest paintings were self portraits. I looked at my own figure, gesture, and body language for evidence of my thoughts and feelings. When I discovered that connection I expressed it through color and paint gestures. For the last couple decades, I have created narrative works inspired by dreams, memories, and direct observation. I start with my personal experience and strive for compositions that are universal. As the zeitgeist of figurative art has fixated on identities, I’ve found that representations of gender, race, and body type can be distracting. In 2014, I was struck by the idea to paint a banana as a stand-in for a human figure.  A decade later, I’ve made it the focus of my work. Bananas are seemingly robust yet prone to bruising, just like men. Because of these aspects as well as the color and the shape of a banana, they are an apt symbol to explore ideas around masculinity.”

For additional information, contact the Barton Art Galleries at artgalleries@barton.edu or call 252-399-6476.

Photos by @treythomasphotography

Action painting is often created in a large format with the canvases worked in a horizontal position often laid upon the ground. Artists working in this method use a variety of unconventional approaches uncommon to more traditional easel painting. Raw canvas is stained with dilute color and thick gobs of paint are poured, dripped, or applied sometimes with mops or syringes instead of brushes.

Originally painted in 1999, this painting was first exhibited (while the paint was still drying) at the Worth Ryder Gallery in Kroeber Hall at the University of California at Berkeley a few floors below where it had been created. The painting was next exhibited at Artspace 712 in San Francisco in 2011 and featured in the Protean Dreams exhibition catalogue. The painting’s fourth installation will take place November 2023 at the re-opening of Vivian Howard’s award winning restaurant Chef & Farmer in Kinston, NC.

Photos Pendo_01-12 by @treythomasphotography

Opening Reception: Saturday, 28 September, 4-6 pm

Longtime friend of Iceland, David Molesky, debuts a new series of paintings — depicting bananas as the main characters — at Brut Restaurant in partnership with Gallery Port.

David has worked as a figurative painter for the last couple decades. He first began making work in Iceland in 2006/2007 at the old city library when it was owned by Odd Nerdrum. Recently, he has combined two tropes from art history – the hero and the banana — into an allegory to illustrate certain aspects of masculinity that are making the world bananas.

In the early months of the pandemic, while he was artist-in-residence at the Akureyri Art Museum, David made a painting of people in hazmat attending a human-sized banana. Arni Mar of Gallery Port, installed the painting at Brut where it became a point of conversation with visitors and staff alike who proposed theories of the painting’s meaning.

Initially the concept came to David in a flash when he saw a newspaper image of an ebola outbreak and he understood the potential expansion of the metaphor. There was a visual similarity to Renaissance deposition paintings including those of martyrs and saints. The celebrated aggrandizement of these male central protagonists inspired David to sometimes enlarge the banana to whale-sized proportions while exploring the gestural potential of peels anthropomorphized.

The exhibition at Brut will feature 10 of David’s newest paintings which will be displayed into the new year with the restaurant hosting a closing reception on Saturday 1/11/2025.

Gallery Port is planning a solo presentation of Molesky’s series Banana Deposition.

Kollegars is Icelandic for collaborators – the group show celebrates 7 years since the gallery’s founding. The exhibition includes a black and white oil painting by Molesky titled Bananarama (above).

Artsuite proudly presents an 18 month installation of David Molesky’s nearly 18 foot wide painting — “Electric Water Lilies” in the Pendo building of downtown Raleigh at 301 Hillsborough.

This is the largest work from Molesky’s series of abstracts that draw inspiration from what the critic Harold Rosenberg coined as Action Painting, a term that encompasses the likes of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaller, and Sam Francis.

Action painting is often created in a large format with the canvases worked in a horizontal position often laid upon the ground. Artists working in this method use a variety of unconventional approaches uncommon to more traditional easel painting. Raw canvas is stained with dilute color and thick gobs of paint are poured, dripped, or applied sometimes with mops or syringes instead of brushes.

Originally painted in 1999, this painting was first exhibited (while the paint was still drying) at the Worth Ryder Gallery in Kroeber Hall at the University of California at Berkeley a few floors below where it had been created. The painting was next exhibited at Artspace 712 in San Francisco in 2011 and featured in the Protean Dreams exhibition catalogue. The painting’s fourth installation will take place November 2023 at the re-opening of Vivian Howard’s award winning restaurant Chef & Farmer in Kinston, NC.

Photos Pendo_01-12 by @treythomasphotography

David Hummer, director of the WMoCA, Didi Menendez founder of Poets&Artists, as well as guest curators Dr. Elaine Schmidt and Steven Bennet have organized an exhibition of 45 works by some of the world’s leading contemporary figurative painters including Ann Gale, David Kassan, Alex Kanevsky, Dianne Gall, and David Molesky.

Pictured with Fire Dancer: Dr. Elaine Schmidt, exhibition co-curator (below).

During an extended artistic residency in Iceland over the first pandemic winter, Molesky created a series of paintings depicting solitary figures in interior spaces,  who perhaps express a longing for interaction with the outside world. Rather than rendering every inch of the canvas to its full extent, Molesky intentionally left parts unpainted with his drawing exposed. This “unfinished” style engages the viewer to actively view the works and complete the image in their mind’s eye. Molesky gives particular attention to painting the areas that are met with the light from outside and lets the color of the raw linen serve as the shadows.

“In a sensuously visual regard, Molesky’s work recalls the Romantic painters of the late 18th century.  Amorphous forms like fire, smoke, clouds, sea spumes, and light itself are a staple of his oeuvre, and provide ample surface area for painterly expression. As with the Romantics, the human figures in Molesky’s paintings seem hopelessly small in the face of nature’s fury, forever at the limits of their abilities as they abut mountains, seas, and in Molesky’s paintings, walls of smoke.
Take out these human figures, and fire and smoke seem the real subject.  One soft contour blurs into another, and reflects a worldview in which nothing has a fixed form, and everything is forever in a state of becoming, enveloping, and rejoining.  These are primal paintings.  They could be paintings of the beginning of the world, of chaos before it has found order, of the void before it has been formed, of Shiva or Kali, of Pandora’s Box.

Those who light the fuses unleash a force far beyond their control — a force that has ample chance, as the show title argues, to be “returned to sender.”  This is the most chilling political message of all: fire begets fire, violence begets violence.  The specific political situations of these paintings are simply their surface stories.  We are in Kiev, Ukraine, and in Ferguson, Missouri, and on the border of Gaza, but all the while we are knocking on the door of the deeper mysteries of nature — and humanity — inherently Romantic, ever-forming, ever destroying, ever creating, chaos.”

— reviewed by Mark Jenkins, critic for The Washington Post

The power of speculative and science fiction in prose—such as in the works of Margaret Atwood, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro—is based on the transformation of technology or science into a metaphor, not to define the future but to describe the present, to explore the existing human condition. Time travel and interstellar space have been used to explore the distance between two people. Clones and robots have helped authors speak about the human soul, or the lack of one. Dystopias and natural or man-made apocalypses—astronomical, biological, chemical, nuclear—have explored the limits of the human will to survive. Rarely has that metaphorical power of technology and science been used effectively in the context of poetry or art. – Samuel Peralta

Group show curated by Ben Shattuck.

The fourth solo presentation of this series of paintings based upon media imagery from the Ukrainian Revolution.

Reviewed by Juxtapoz Magazine, Hi-Fructose Magazine, and LiFO.gr

Exhibition tracking the influence of contemporary painters from Old Masters, including works by Bouguereau, Gérôme, and Giambologna.