JAKUPSIL

Recently founded in New York City, HIERRO is an artist-driven curatorial platform dedicated to short-term exhibitions of consequence. Our ethos is built around the longstanding history of artists who self-organize with the desire of questioning traditional modes of showing work. We imagine ourselves as a painters’ punk rock band channeling a DIY sensibility.

A Short Lived Torture of Cacophony is our first exhibition, organized by Jorge Rios, with a focus on contemporary post-painterly pictures that rejects symbolism and interpretation in favor of a direct visual experience. The exhibition features works by Michelle Brandemuehl, Ron Ewert, Jorge Rios, and Benjamin Lee Sperry.

​

Michelle Brandemuehl

Branemuehl's work is a conversation about the whatness of people, places and things. I rely on restraint and minimal form as a point of entry, exploring the relationship between subtlety and the sublime. I’m interested in the qualities of opposites and how two opposing forces hold the same space, as examined through my choice of materials – the grit of spray paint on linen, black on white, the defined lines of the rectangle, and the soft glow of fog. The object responds to and changes in response to these contradictions. The materials and structure I choose form an emotional architecture, creating a dialogue with the viewer that invites them to explore these paradoxes. My recent work explores the idea of landscapes in outer space: using the vantage point of looking through a window, the border framing this other world, questioning what we think we see, and the possibilities that lie in the unseen.

​

Ron Ewert

Ewert’s paintings use a variety of indexical makeshift printing processes that fix objects and actions into a graphic visual language, opening up and confusing the pathology of painting. Like Dylan’s lyrical folk-Dada mashup, these works speak to an accelerated pace of physical and psychic change, finding emptiness in a surplus of cultural noise.

Jorge Rios 

Rios' paintings are driven by process and grounded in the history of abstraction. Combining gestural brushstrokes, drips, and stains with graphic elements such as grids and patterns, the work employs highly saturated pigments across large-scale canvases and paper. These contrasting techniques embody divergent approaches to abstraction—juxtaposing fast and slow mark-making, soft and hard edges, and accident with intention. Central to the practice is an investigation into the coexistence of opposing forces: artifice, in the form of illusion and construction, and truth, through emotion and sincerity.

The work ultimately seeks to blur the boundary between aesthetic trickery and artistic honesty. Eschewing repetition in favor of stylistic variety, the artist resists a fixed visual identity. Each painting becomes a kind of funhouse mirror, reflecting a range of artistic movements and sensibilities while maintaining a sense of play and ongoing jest.

Benjamin Lee Sperry

Sperry creates visual compositions by interacting with new material alongside the rapid reproduction of my extensive personal archive comprising tens of thousands of images, pdf’s, and recordings. He believes that formal qualities and the latent meanings of images and objects are inexplicably intertwined. Archived material becomes a record, rewritten and re-examined -  a personal history that takes on new meaning and accumulates information every time it is activated. His work is deliberate, and yet completely personal and at times irrational. He uses material exploration and repetition as a catalyst for thought.  He works from the belief that through the images he can decode and understand own existence.

​

Hours: 11AM - 6PM 

30-43 31st Street, Astoria NY

VIEW MAP

​

Inquiries:

T. +1 215 906 5200

E. brett.jakupsil@gmail.com

W. www.jakupsil.com

IG. @jakupsilny