Paradise Lost and Found was the theme of this 14th iteration of SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. The fair’s founders, Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, selected Molesky’s series of banana works, collectively called Prone to Bruise, for an Artist Solo Spotlight. On the 10th floor of the office building at 75 Varick Street, the curators placed about 300 artists into various repurposed workspaces.

At Booth D2, Molesky’s solo exhibition consisted of 24 original oil paintings and an edition of risograph prints that will be available on the fair’s website until August 1st.

Photos by Samuel Morgan Photography, SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York 2025

Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct. 24, 5–7 PM

Gallery Talk: Thursday, Oct. 24, 6 PM

Coffee Talk: Wednesday, Oct. 30th, 4–6 PM

Workshops: Saturday, Oct. 26 & Nov. 2, 10 AM–4 PM

“Many of my earliest paintings were self portraits. I looked at my own figure, gesture, and body language for evidence of my thoughts and feelings. When I discovered that connection I expressed it through color and paint gestures. For the last couple decades, I have created narrative works inspired by dreams, memories, and direct observation. I start with my personal experience and strive for compositions that are universal. As the zeitgeist of figurative art has fixated on identities, I’ve found that representations of gender, race, and body type can be distracting. In 2014, I was struck by the idea to paint a banana as a stand-in for a human figure.  A decade later, I’ve made it the focus of my work. Bananas are seemingly robust yet prone to bruising, just like men. Because of these aspects as well as the color and the shape of a banana, they are an apt symbol to explore ideas around masculinity.”

For additional information, contact the Barton Art Galleries at artgalleries@barton.edu or call 252-399-6476.

Photos by @treythomasphotography

Action painting is often created in a large format with the canvases worked in a horizontal position often laid upon the ground. Artists working in this method use a variety of unconventional approaches uncommon to more traditional easel painting. Raw canvas is stained with dilute color and thick gobs of paint are poured, dripped, or applied sometimes with mops or syringes instead of brushes.

Originally painted in 1999, this painting was first exhibited (while the paint was still drying) at the Worth Ryder Gallery in Kroeber Hall at the University of California at Berkeley a few floors below where it had been created. The painting was next exhibited at Artspace 712 in San Francisco in 2011 and featured in the Protean Dreams exhibition catalogue. The painting’s fourth installation will take place November 2023 at the re-opening of Vivian Howard’s award winning restaurant Chef & Farmer in Kinston, NC.

Photos Pendo_01-12 by @treythomasphotography

Opening Reception: Saturday, 28 September, 4-6 pm

Longtime friend of Iceland, David Molesky, debuts a new series of paintings — depicting bananas as the main characters — at Brut Restaurant in partnership with Gallery Port.

David has worked as a figurative painter for the last couple decades. He first began making work in Iceland in 2006/2007 at the old city library when it was owned by Odd Nerdrum. Recently, he has combined two tropes from art history – the hero and the banana — into an allegory to illustrate certain aspects of masculinity that are making the world bananas.

In the early months of the pandemic, while he was artist-in-residence at the Akureyri Art Museum, David made a painting of people in hazmat attending a human-sized banana. Arni Mar of Gallery Port, installed the painting at Brut where it became a point of conversation with visitors and staff alike who proposed theories of the painting’s meaning.

Initially the concept came to David in a flash when he saw a newspaper image of an ebola outbreak and he understood the potential expansion of the metaphor. There was a visual similarity to Renaissance deposition paintings including those of martyrs and saints. The celebrated aggrandizement of these male central protagonists inspired David to sometimes enlarge the banana to whale-sized proportions while exploring the gestural potential of peels anthropomorphized.

The exhibition at Brut will feature 10 of David’s newest paintings which will be displayed into the new year with the restaurant hosting a closing reception on Saturday 1/11/2025.