Fragile | Online Exhibition
It is not half so important to know as to feel. – RACHEL CARSON
Planthouse is pleased to present FRAGILE, an online group exhibition that includes works by 15 artists.
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS: Mildred Beltré, Anders Bergstrom, Noah Breuer, Victoria Burge, Louise Eastman, Greg Foley, Simryn Gill, Valerie Hammond, Ruth Lingen, Matt Magee, Lothar Osterburg, Janis Stemmermann, Wendy Small, Naho Tarusihi, and Heather Watkins.
View and download the checklist by clicking here.
The gallery is currently closed and will reopen in September. Thank you for your support. Enjoy the show!
Wishing all good health and safety,
PLANTHOUSE
Mildred Beltré, Skin in the Game
Skin in the Game (Up), 2019
Walnut ink and digital print
22 x 30 inches
$1,500
Skin in the Game (Reverse), 2019
Walnut ink and digital print
22 x 30 inches
$1,500
Skin the Game (Away), 2019,
Walnut ink and digital print
22 x 30 inches
$1,500
ARTIST STATEMENT: I am interested in the idea of legibility and the gaze. How do people see what they see? And what does what you see mean? These works, part of a larger, ongoing series called Skin in the Game, explore the simultaneous troubles of hypervisibility and invisibility.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Mildred Beltré is Brooklyn based artist, mother and activist working in print, drawing and participatory politically engaged practice, to explore facets of social change. She is interested in exploring political movements and their associated social relations and structures. Beltré is the co-founder of the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, an ongoing socially engaged collaborative art project in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that addresses gentrification and community building through art-making.
Beltré’s selected national exhibitions include: Brooklyn Museum, NY; De Cordova Museum, MA; Everson Museum, NY; Fleming Museum, VT; International Print Center New York, NYC; Burlington City Arts, Burlington, VT; Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA; University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; Art in General, NYC ; and international group shows at Projecto Ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hollar Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; Brun Leglise Gallery, Paris France, among others.Her work is included in the Special Collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN among others.
She has been awarded residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop, the Vermont Studio Center and the Santa Fe Art Institute. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Foundation and the Rema Hort Foundation, among others.
Anders Bergstrom, June 2020 Number 7
June 2020 Number 7, 2020
Monotype and relief printing on Akatosashi hand-printed and folded
3 1/8 x 2 x 1 1/2 inches
$1,500
June 2020 Number 7, 2020
Monotype and relief printing on Akatosashi hand-printed and folded
3 1/8 x 2 x 1 1/2 inches
$1,500
June 2020 Number 7, 2020
Monotype and relief printing on Akatosashi hand-printed and folded
3 1/8 x 2 x 1 1/2 inches
$1,500
ARTIST STATEMENT: Completed in 2019, these unique works are a combination of soft ground etching and simultaneous color viscosity monotype. For Bergstrom this new process of viscosity printing was challenging and inspiring, setting in motion a productive moment in his practice. The process offered a freedom to be spontaneous, and the resulting series of prints and objects break new ground for the artist’s work.
Bergstom’s subject, the common brown bag, is familiar to the artist and those who know his work. But there is now a more playful, less reality-based result, allowing this new series to be more colorful, painterly, and thought-provoking.
In representing this common object in modern life, the brown bag, these works are strange and familiar. They inspire thought and wonder at what may have lead up to the moment it was found, pinned, splashed, stained or otherwise altered into its current state. This subject can be interpreted through different lenses: contemporary artifact, utility design object, garbage, ready-made, memory, street detritus, lunch sack, environmental concerns or societal connotations.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Anders Bergstrom (1971) was born in Tucson, Arizona and has a Bachelor of Arts, Sociology and Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Bergstrom’s work is held in the collections of The New York Public Library, University of New Hampshire, Beinecke Library at Yale University, Smith College Museum of Art, MA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Recent exhibitions include Pulled in Brooklyn, International Print Center New York, NY; Anders Bergstrom: Recent Work, presented by Dolan/Maxwell and C.R. Ettinger Studio Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Things, The McIninch Art Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University; Print Think, Temple Contemporary, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; Drawings and Prints: Selections from The Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Four More Years, Planthouse, New York, NY; Anders Bergstrom: Prints, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA.
Noah Breuer, Carl Breuer and Sons
Swing Girl Terrycloth, 2019
2019 Kiln Formed Glass
17 x 20 x 1 inch
$1,600 
Red Tablecloth, 2019
Kiln Formed Glass
15 x 13 x 13 inches
$2,000
Spring Green Placemat, 2019
Kiln Formed Glass
17 x 20 x 1 inch
$1,600
ARTIST STATEMENT: This work examines the visual legacy “Carl Breuer and Sons” (CB&S), my family’s former textile printing business, founded 1897 in Bohemia. In 1939 the company, along with all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas, was seized and sold to Nazi-approved owners, most of my family members were killed in Auschwitz, and the product of their work was lost. Through my 2016 visit to the factory’s archive of fabric samples and designs held at the Czech Textile Museum, I have amassed a rich digital collection of primary source material in the form of scans and photographs. This foundational archive has been my springboard for a variety of installations as well as works on paper, fabric and glass. My research has opened a window to the material world of my lost European family and allowed me to create a physical connection to the past. These new artworks not only resurrect CB&S designs but also reinterpret them and in turn, raise questions about labor, authorship and appropriation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Noah Breuer is an artist and printmaker born and raised in Berkeley, California. Breuer has had recent solo exhibitions at Left Field Gallery in San Luis Obispo, California; Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, SPACE Gallery in Portland Maine; and Spudnik Press in Chicago, Illinois. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Breuer is an Assistant Professor at Auburn University. He holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA from Columbia University. He also earned a graduate research certificate in traditional woodblock printmaking and paper-making from Kyoto Seika University in Japan.
Victoria Burge, Notations
Notation 8, 2018
Pencil and gesso on sheet music
8.5 x 8 inches
Sold
Notation 12, 2019
Pencil and gesso on antique graph paper
12.5 x 10 inches
$850
ARTIST STATEMENT: The drawings and objects in Notations reference a variety of mathematical systems- weaving codes, numeric sequences, and children’s games- to explore patterns as a visual language. Composed of infinite combinations, these patterned arrangements identify universes of connectivity through metered marks.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Victoria Burge’s multidisciplinary practice employs mathematics and mapping to develop a visual language of pattern. Her works have been included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and Blum & Poe Los Angeles. Her drawings and prints are part of the permanent collections at The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, The Esopus Foundation, and Beinecke Library at Yale University.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the Haystack School of Craft, the Macdowell Colony and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her exhibitions and printmaking collaborations have been reviewed in numerous journals including ArtNews and Art In Print.
Louise Eastman, Dice
Dice 1/6, 2020
Monoprint on manila folder
17 1/2 x 12 inches
Published by artist, Printed at Russel Janis Studio, Brooklyn NY
$200 
Dice 2/5, 2020
Monoprints on manila folders
17 1/2 x 12 inches
Published by artist, Printed at Russel Janis Studio, Brooklyn NY
$200
Dice 3/4, 2020
Monoprints on manila folders
17 1/2 x 12 inches
Published by artist, Printed at Russel Janis Studio, Brooklyn NY
Sold
ARTIST STATEMENT: Combining weaving and printmaking, I inked up a 6 square weavings, each one a ‘side of a die’ and printed multiple times with a mimeograph like blue on manilla folders, offering the viewer the suggestion of a random roll. The combination of folders and ink hark to random office supplies, photocopies, and memories of a more well-ordered world. The dice are either a random role or a stacked deck. Either way, fragile.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Louise Eastman is an artist who works in textile and ceramics, but still thinks like a painter.
Greg Foley, After Memphis
Ashoka (after Ettore Sottsass), 2019
Dye sublimation on aluminum
24 x 24 inches, circular
Edition of 3
$2,500
Cerchio (after Nathalie Du Pasquier), 2019
Dye sublimation on aluminum
24 x 24 inches, circular
Edition of 3
$2,500
Hilton (after Javier Mariscal), 2019
Dye sublimation on aluminum
24 x 24 inches, circular
Edition of 3
$2,500
ARTIST STATEMENT: In 2014 I began a series of abstract color studies based on the tangible world. It occurred to me that the impact light and color have, depends on your expectation of the environment or media you encounter. For me, this is an important story that explores my half-Filipino roots and my journey traveling the world and its cultural landscapes. By sampling tonal palettes from specific objects I’ve experienced, I reduce them to recognizable interplay of light and color, formless except for the blank field on which they’re displayed. The title of each artwork reveals the original source that I am appropriating. The resulting colorfield abstractions each create a simulacrum of my experience and memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Greg Foley is an artist, designer, author and illustrator. He was born in the Philippines, raised in Texas and moved to New York after attending Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Beinecke Library, Yale University; and others. Foley is a visiting lecturer and critic at Parsons School of Design, RISD, Columbia University, Yale, and UT. He is the author-illustrator of eleven children’s books including the acclaimed Thank You Bear series (Viking) as well as the illustrated history of subculture COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion (Rizzoli), and a contributing cover artist for The New Yorker.
Simryn Gill, Channel
Channel, 2014
A photogravure printed by Lothar Osterberg in Brooklyn
15 x 20 inches
Edition of 50
$1000
ARTIST STATEMENT: In 2014, Planthouse published The Floral Ghost, a portfolio of prints by six artists along with an essay by the writer Susan Orlean. The gallery asked the artists to consider plants and the perpetually changing nature of the city, as seen through the prism of the gallery’s location in New York’s historic flower district. Malaysia-based Simryn Gill contributed Channel, the photogravure to the portfolio. The print was published in an edition of fifty and printed by Lothar Osterburg in Brooklyn.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Simryn Gill creates her works by drawing images and resources from her surroundings. As a result, her many bodies of work track her well-traveled biography: Gill is of Indian descent, was born in Singapore, raised in Malaysia, and is now based in Sydney, Australia. Her conceptual installations and photographs, as a result, explore the ways in which memory and history affect culture and landscapes. My Own Private Angkor (2007-09) is comprised of 90 photographs taken from a proximate housing development in Malaysia that had been abandoned and vandalized. Her other projects include installations made from casually collected circular objects, spherical forms made from molding found materials, and cutouts of certain phrases from various books. In many of these works, Gill invites the viewer to play with and rearrange the objects.
Valerie Hammond, Bedlam 07, 14, 17
Bedlam 07, 2020
Watercolor on Japan paper
17 x 21 inches
$2,400
Bedlam 14, 2020
Watercolor on Japan paper
17 x 21 inches
$2,400
Bedlam 17, 2020
Watercolor on gampi paper
18 x 25 inches
$2,400
ARTIST STATEMENT: Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Valerie Hammond‘s work can be found in both private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, The Fine Arts Museum Houston, The Progressive Art Collection, the Fidelity Collection, the New York Public Library’s print and drawing collection, The Chazen Museum, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Grand Palais Museum, Paris and the Getty Museum. She is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally.
Ruth Lingen, The Detachment
The Detachment, 2020
Diptich on Zerkall Ingres paper
25 x 38 inches
Edition of 6
$1,500
ARTIST STATEMENT: In these turbulent times, life itself seems exceedingly fragile to me. It seemed appropriate at this tragic time in history, to release this edition rubbed from the stone of poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s grave in Paris in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of his death. Apollinaire died of Spanish Flu during the pandemic of 1918. The first two stanzas are excerpted from his long poem “The Hills” (a book I published in 2004) and describe his reflections on the acceptance of death. In the last stanza, he directs us to do as he has: accept kindness, suffering and miracles and we will ‘know the future’.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Ruth Lingen is a master print and paper collaborator and visual artist, based in New York City. Her personal practice is based in language, sometimes combined with a historical twist, and often employs hand-set type and letterpress combined with printmaking. Her work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Museum, as well as over 35 libraries, including the New York Public library and the Harvard University Library.
Matt Magee, Fragment Flag
Fragment Flag, 2019
Three-color Silkscreen on Rives BFK
30 x 41 1/2 inches
Edition of 22
$2,500
ARTIST STATEMENT: Fragment Flag is a three-color silkscreen printed in an edition of 22. In today’s world, America is more divided than ever, disunited over myriad social issues. These schisms run deep, creating the fractured system that Fragment Flag addresses.
“Fragment Flag equals divisive speech, divisive tweets, divided families, divided migrant families, fragmented politics, fragmented political parties, a star spangled symbol of red, white and blue in disarray.” – Matt Magee
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Matt Magee is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his minimalist abstract geometric works. Magee’s repertoire includes painting, sculptures, photography, assemblages, and murals. Born in Paris, France, Magee has since lived in Libya, London, New York City, and his current home, Arizona. While Magee’s sculptures focus heavily on repurposing media, his paintings emphasize repetition and recurrence. Although Magee’s style is minimalist, his work is expressive and inspired by contemporary science, ecology, and technology.
Magee is represented by galleries in New Mexico, Texas, London, Massachusetts, and Chicago. In 2017, he won the Arlene and Morton Scult Award, adding to a collection of earlier awards. Magee’s work has been exhibited around the world.
Published by Planthouse, 2019
Lothar Osterburg
Morning Commute (After the Flood), 2018
Photogravure
11 x 11 inches on 16 x 15 inches
Edition of 7
$1,400
Suspension Bridge, 2004
Photogravure
35 x 14 inches on 35 x 14 inches
Edition of 8
$2,000 
The Old Wreck, 2004
Photogravure
23 x 17.25 inches on 23 x 17.25 inches
Edition of 8
$2,500 
Tibetan Footbridge, 2003
Photogravure
33.75 x 23.25 inches on 33.75 x 23.25 inches
Edition of 8
$2,800 
Vietnamese Footbridge, 2002
Photogravure
23 x 29 inches on 30 x 35 inches
Edition of 10
$2,800 
Wreck of the Somerset, 2004
Photogravure
23.5 x 34 inches on 23.5 x 34 inches
Edition of 8
$3,500 (unframed
ARTIST STATEMENT: Working from memory, using small-scale models intuitively by hand from readily available, found material, staged to look almost real, I create images of lost or imagined worlds. By printing the photographs of these setups in the 19th century photographic processes of copperplate photogravure, they become timeless. The soft focus, the scratches and traces from the photogravure process, and the use of rough and unfinished models all work together to suspend the final image somewhere between the real and the imaginary.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: The Hudson Valley based German native Lothar Osterburg is known as an artist, master printer and teacher of photogravure. He completed art school at the Art Academy Braunschweig in Germany and received his training as Master Printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. Osterburg has shown internationally and has work in major collections. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in Art; from the American Academy of Arts and Letters both in 2010, two New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowships and a 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for Excellence in Printmaking. He currently teaches at Bard College, NY.
Janis Stemmermann, LISTENING
LISTENING, 2020
Hign fire ceramic/food safe
2 x 13 x 13 inches
SOLD 
LISTENING, 2020
Hign fire ceramic/food safe
2 x 13 x 13 inches
SOLD 
LISTENING, 2020
Hign fire ceramic/food safe
2 x 13 x 13 inches
SOLD
ARTIST STATEMENT: Listening is a challenging act, to do it well one has to follow a communication thread that can be broken very easily. In this large shallow bowl, I mirrored the word LISTENING in repeat requiring the viewer to make, depending on vantage point, an extra effort to discern, engage and be present.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Janis Stemmermann is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work continuously explores the relationship between form and pattern in sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and textiles.
Wendy Small, Articles of Glass
Articles of Glass 1, 2020
Silver gelatin print
11 x 14 inches
Open edition
$250
Articles of Glass 2 , 2020
Silver gelatin print
11 x 14 inches
Open edition
$250
ARTIST STATEMENT: One gift of NYC is it has stores with glass shelves of bongs on nearly every avenue. Each time I see them I am transported like time travel back to my favorite Fox Talbot photograph “Articles of Glass on Three Shelves.” I thought it would be funny to use the smoke shop in a similar way to his photographs. I read that he photographed these glasses because it defended his idea that photography could easily do what the best painters of his time struggled with… the use of paint to suggest clear glass. Having studied painting and now use that education in photographic work I enjoyed this photography vs. painting conversation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Wendy Small is an American artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her degree in painting from the School of Visual Arts, followed by her BSN from New York University. Small was assistant to the painter Terry Winters for ten years, and since then has worked as a nurse at Grace Church School. In 2002, Small began working solely with the photogram process. Her photograms have been displayed in galleries throughout NY and the United States, including at Sears Peyton, Morgan Lehman, and Von Lintel Gallery. Small has spent two summers at the Vermont Studio Center Residency, and has participated in Aipad, Nada, Pulse and Photo LA. art fairs. Her work can be found in both private and public collections.
Naho Tarusihi, Iceberg
Iceberg, 2018
Graphite on paper
18 x 15 inches
$1,200
ARTIST STATEMENT: “It is not half so important to know as to feel” – Rachel Carson
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Born in Tokyo, Japan, Naho Taruishi lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been shown at Planthouse Gallery, The Drawing Center, A.I.R Gallery in New York, NY as well as shows at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, TX, and RK Projects, RI among others. Her publications are held in various institutional collections including the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Harvard University and Lyrik Kabinett in Munich, Germany.
Heather Watkins, Seeing Things
Seeing Things (no. 34), 2015
Ink on linen
15 x 15 1/2 inches
$1,100
Seeing Things (no. 43), 2015
Ink on linen
14 x 17 1/2 inches
$1,100
Seeing Things (no. 44), 2015
Ink on linen
14 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches
$1,100
Seeing Things (no. 46), 2015
Ink on linen
14 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches
$1,100
ARTIST STATEMENT: One summer when wildfires were burning nearby and the air was filled with smoke, I wanted to cool down in the studio, to be immersed in a process, and to look beyond that time, into another. Each of the works in this series—over fifty in all—were made in the same way: submerging linen in water, wringing it out, flooding it with a spectrum of blues, always emanating from the center. Over and over, through many cycles of saturation and evaporation, things appeared and disappeared, as I watched for signs of new ways of thinking and knowing and feeling and seeing and being.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Heather Watkins is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work takes many forms, often dissolving or blurring distinctions between disciplines such as drawing, sculpture, text, and textile. Watkins has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions at venues that include: the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR); PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, OR); CANADA (New York, NY); the lumber room (Portland, OR); Planthouse (New York, NY); and Front of House (Portland, OR). Her work is held in many public and private collections such as the Portland Art Museum; the Miller Meigs Collection; Reed College; Portland State University; and numerous artist’s book collections. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and is represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, OR). In addition to her art practice, Watkins designs books and printed materials in collaboration with artists, curators, galleries, museums, and arts organizations.