Planthouse is happy to present Monsters - Superheroes - Flowers, featuring work by Chuck Webster, Katherine Bradford and Martin Mazorra. In addition, we will debut our first publication, Forty-Three Monsters, a limited edition artist book by Arthur Bradford and Chuck Webster. 

Monsters

Chuck Webster has created new paintings and drawings inspired by the images in Forty-Three Monsters. The book includes drawings made by Webster when he was a child in the 1970s. A narrative by Arthur Bradford accompanies the images. ChuckWebster (b. 1970, Binghamton, NewYork) is represented by ZieherSmith in NewYork. Recent solo shows include Betty Cuningham Gallery in New York, ACME in Los Angeles and Philip Slein in St. Louis. He has been in group shows at The Saatchi Gallery in London, De Pury and Luxembourg in Zurich, DC Moore Gallery, PS1, Francis M. Naumann in New York, and Rhona Hoffman in Chicago. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tang Teaching Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Superheroes

Recent superhero paintings by Katherine Bradford will also be on view. In 2012, critic John Yau wrote about her paintings: “There is an intelligence and sensitivity in what she does that can only be gotten by doing, and by remaining open to chance, impulsiveness and to the possibilities of what painting can teach you. At their best, these paintings embody a mystery that keeps opening up without ever revealing itself—they are that rich in their generosity.” Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) is a painter who splits her time between New York and Maine. She is represented by Edward Thorp Gallery in New York and recently had a solo show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine. In 2009 she was a Resident Faculty member at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2012. Bradford has shown her work in New York at PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, The Journal Gallery, Dodge Gallery and CANADA. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Museum of Art.

Flowers 

Martin Mazzora's series of woodcut and letterpress prints from the series Language of Flowers continue the late 19th and early 20th century practice of exchanging flowers as coded communication. In reserved Victorian society flowers conveyed messages about love and hate that were not dared spoken. Specific species denoted specific postures that were widely understood. Mazorra’s flowers and text add contemporary, prurient twists to this tradition of secret sentimentality. Martin Mazorra (b. 1972, Morgantown, West Virginia) received a BFA from West Virginia University in 1994, and an MFA from American University inWashington D.C. in 1996. He teaches at Pratt Institute and Parson’s School of Design in New York. Mazorra was was the recipient of a 2007 NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking, Drawing and Artist Books. He was also a 2009 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, New York.

About the Author 

Arthur Bradford (b. 1969, Boothbay Harbor, Maine) is an O Henry Award winning writer and Emmy-nominated filmmaker. His writing has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Vice, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. His first book, Dogwalker, was published by Knopf and Vintage paperback in 2002, and has been translated into ten languages. His latest book, Benny’s Brigade, is a children’s book, published by McSweeney’s in September 2012. His next book of stories will be published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in late 2014.