McKenzie Fine Art

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467

	Aric Obrosey: Ten Drawings for Claudia February 21 - March 30, 2025
	view exhibition	For over thirty years Aric Obrosey has used lace imagery in his work, attracted to its intricate patterning, structural complexity, precise detail, and overall beauty. In this exhibition, small-scale drawings executed largely in ink and gouache pay homage to Frank Stella’s Black Paintings from the late 1950s, in particular, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959, in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the same way that Stella created narrow gaps of untouched canvas in his black-banded paintings (the so-called “pin stripes”), Obrosey forms varied reticella lace motifs by edging ink towards untouched white paper in his drawings. The bands in the post and lintel structure are inked in black in some works, in others they are articulated with loosely brushed grays or other colors, or filled with narrow linear elements. While he has retained Stella’s repeated structural arrangements, Obrosey enhances the architectonic quality of the compositions by adding central portals, lending an air of mystery and uncertainty to the spaces. As the series progressed and became more autonomous, Obrosey began to fill the bands with clusters of precise marks and discrete, varied patterns, as in work he had made decades earlier. Obrosey began to think of this mark-making as akin to abstracted memories. Eventually the lace patterns disappeared altogether, replaced by structures filled with “memory marks,” dense in places, and more openly spaced in others. While these marks retain the complexity and precision of his lace renditions, they also impart a sense of movement and heightened energy to the reductive compositional structures. These recent drawings retain all of the hallmarks of Obrosey’s work over the decades: an embrace of the endless possibilities of pattern rendered with a generous and focused intensity.

	Laura Sharp Wilson: Anticipation is Making Me Wait February 21 - March 30, 2025
	view exhibition	Laura Sharp Wilson creates idiosyncratic worlds in her acrylic paintings, combining botanic imagery with a formal language of motifs and patterns derived from the world of decorative arts. Her forms, vividly colored and precisely rendered, are set against gold backgrounds, fields of tiny dots, or patterned textile-like imagery. While dense, the compositions are ordered, with the disparate elements encircled, bound, draped or otherwise linked together by thorny vines, chains, cords, ribbons, and ornamental beads. The works in this exhibition reflect Wilson’s long-time fascination with the patterns found in domestic interiors, ranging from wallpapers, upholstery, drapery and rugs, to decorative objects such as ceramics and jewelry, as well as clothing and accessories. Many of her works explore how styles and aesthetics join with botanical elements to speak of social class and social aspirations, as well as the fragility of the natural world, seen through the lens of childhood memories and personal history. Golden Wasp Log with Mrs. Hallowell’s Nantucket Purse sets a pink stylized nurse log--a decaying fallen tree which provides nurture to new seedlings—alongside ornamental signifiers of an upper class interior. Chinoiserie in Denver reflects memories of a socially important great aunt and Wilson’s fascination with the patterns and cobalt blue color found in her collection of Chinese ceramics. Other paintings are more playful, with references to a beloved first pair of bellbottoms in a Lilly Pulitzer lion pattern, contrasted with the more prosaic imagery of oversized dandelions, which the artist wove into chains as a child. Harkening to the present day, Wilson addresses the evisceration of the natural world and the hollowing out of human identity by technology and social media in the painting They Turned Me Into a Ghost. In This Impossible World, one floral form implodes while others triumph over their entanglements, creating a structure for survival within an ever-maddening and cruel world.

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467
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