Luna Ranjit Awarded Grinnel Prize

Luna Ranjit (right) with (L-R) Eva Schicker, Luna's husband,
and Brinda Rai in front of paintings by Alkemikal Soshu
at the gallery last year

Full House East - Reception This Friday

Our long-running group show was initiated by David Rich and Paulette Myers-Rich in St Paul Minnesota back in July as Full House West. The show migrated to our gallery in Park Slope Brooklyn in early September, and it will remain up until November 2nd.

Unhurried Antinomies – the work of Alkemikal Soshu

The Matador oil on canvas 30 x 59.5 in. 2012

Alkemikal Soshu speaks of reconciling opposites, and not just opposites but antinomies, of fundamentally irreconcilable things. His paintings are accretions of such things, compacted strata of the difficult and unwieldy, all splayed out.

Alkemikal Soshu's profile on this website
Alkemikal Soshu – Inventory and Prices

The Benign Snotty and the Discovery of the God Particle
oil on canvas 23.75 x 35.75 in. 2012

The paintings remind me of the great Alfred Jensen, who is very well regarded in Brooklyn, for his joinder of non-objective painting and conceptual art, of color and the occult, and for certain mapping tendencies. Soshu’s work reminds me of that oblique tunneling that took place in Brooklyn more than three decades ago. The handful of painters in Greenpoint at that time were influenced by such as Jensen, and also by their socratic mentor James Harrison. It was a moment of esoteric abstraction, during the avalanche of postmodern imagery. These were the origins of Brooklyn’s myriad world of painting today. And it just seems right that a painter of Soshu’s temperament should choose Brooklyn as his frame of reference. Or rather, in the case of Soshu, as a substrate to be catalyzed.

Pipe Mandala pencil and ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2012

Soshu lives in Kathmandu, he has never been to the US or much outside the subcontinent so far as I know. His entrance upon the Bushwick and Williamsburg scene has been brazen, obstinate, opinionated, and entirely by way of facebook. Yet an entrance it most certainly has been, and I am strongly of the opinion that Soshu’s is a bracing contribution precisely to the art scene that he has chosen to engage and to which he was drawn from afar.

His early work of more than about five years ago was inflected by what he calls the “low brow” movement, a kind of international brew of comic, decorative, and graphic art. With surprising speed, and in relative isolation, he put together a fighting palette. The shrewdness of this maneuver impressed me. Irony and panache were achieved that take many a New York artist a decade to achieve. This is thinly veiled by the Himalayan flavor of the paintings, and even that is a conceit. a conceit, no less, that confers mordant humor and originality to Soshu’s canvases.

Hermaphroditos Salmacis oil on canvas 26 x 26 in. 2012

Hermaphroditos Salmacis involves the Greek myth of the nymph Salmacis, who raped Hermaphroditos, the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite. The “union” transformed Hermaphroditos into an androgynous being from whom the word hermaphrodite derives. Writes Soshu:

The mystical derivation would be the belief in holistic transcendence by a union of opposing energies. A completeness and synthesis of opposites. Aphrodite is associated with beauty, Hermes with literature and poetry. Hermaphroditos is the outcome of both, but in male spirit. I think Salmacis is the integration of the female in the symbolism.

Venom oil on canvas 30 x 30 in. 2013

Soshu’s canvases are densely coded, and there are high-pressure zones that gather around matters that need to be “sorted out” as Soshu is fond of saying in the clipped Britishism of the region. This kind of deliberation over a painting is a delight and a relief to me. There is an unhurried generosity here that is appreciated.

— Ethan Pettit, May 2014

Dragon Naga pencil and ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2011

Library of Babel ink on paper 30 x 22 in. 2011

Move in Freedom

Move in freedom, move in total freedom, and each moment remember to drop the past. It accumulates like dust. Each moment you have experienced something, and then it goes on accumulating. Don't accumulate it. Just go on ceasing as far as the past is concerned, dying as far as the past is concerned, so you are totally alive, throbbing, pulsating, streaming, and, whatsoever comes, you face it with awareness.

— Osho

With this long-running show featuring three of our represented artists, we drop the word "contemporary" from the name of our gallery, and embark upon a more general encounter with modernity. And especially, we are interested in the "immersive modernity" that we believe is the key to a theory of Brooklyn art. In a forthcoming catalogue we shall elaborate on this idea, and some further commentary is available in our hard copy press release, which you can download here as a pdf.

— Ethan Pettit

Please join us in Park Slope for a reception for

Move in Freedom

featuring the work of

Mari Oshima, Alkemikal Soshu, and Eva Schicker.

Saturday, September 28, 6:30PM – 9:30PM

Hard Copy Press Release

Facebook Event

Exhibition Homepage

Soshu Covers "Amalgam" in Kathmandu

One of our artists, Alkemikal Soshu, made this video of the annual "Amalgam" show at Siddhartha art gallery in Kathmandu. There are 26 artists in the show, which positions established Nepalese artists along with recent graduates of art academies in Nepal and India.

Soshu's commentary in this video is most interesting. He converses easily with painting and is intimate with the art scene in Nepal. He mentions for example an initiative in the 1960s by the King of Nepal to boost the arts in the kingdom. And there are a number of pithy satires in the show on the monarchy (which was only recently deposed) and on Nepalese society and politics.

There are influences here from traditional religious and court painting, as well as from pop art, abstraction, and figurative art. Quite a diverse and compelling show that should be of interest to art communities around the world.

Arjun Khaling, detail. "A maze of natural tribal culture" says Sohsu 

Tikka Dutta Dahal, Yogis 

Soshu himself is not in this particular show, but he might as well be. Through his online videos and posts he has made himself a cultural ambassador from Kathmandu, where he enjoys perhaps more notoriety as a painter than he might care to admit.

Alkemikal Soshu, The Matador, oil on canvas 30 x 59.5 in. 2012