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The Fuller Building
41 East 57th Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10022
212 535 8810
Hirschl & Adler Modern, founded in 1981, specializes in art from 1913 to the present, with a strong emphasis on American Modernism and the post-war period. It also represents a select group of established and mid-career contemporary artists who are featured regularly through scheduled solo and group exhibitions in its gallery space in the Fuller Building, at the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Its parent company Hirschl & Adler Galleries, founded in 1952, has been specializing in important American and European art of all periods throughout its 70 year history and shares the space with Hirschl & Adler Modern. 

Led for over 50 years by President and Director, Stuart P. Feld, and joined in 1999 by his daughter Elizabeth Feld, Hirschl & Adler mounts about 8 to 10 special exhibitions per year, most accompanied by scholarly publications. Both the contemporary and historical presentations have received critical acclaim and have resulted in the placement of works into major private collections around the world, as well as the finest American and international museums.
Artists Represented:
ARTISTS
Frederick Brosen
Jeanne Brousseau
Lily Cox-Richard
Randall Exon
Angela Fraleigh
Maria Elena Gonzalez
Colin Hunt
David Ligare
John Moore
Stone Roberts
James Everett Stanley
Marc Trujillo
Elizabeth Turk
 
ESTATES
Louisa Chase
Edward James Deeds Jr. [The Electric Pencil]
Honore Sharrer
Stanley Twardowicz
Works Available By:
William Bailey
James Castle
Julie Heffernan
Robert Henri
Edward Hopper
Diana Horowitz
Georgia O'Keeffe
Fairfield Porter
Winold Reiss
Kay Sage
Bill Traylor
Purvis Young
Amy Weiskopf
Christopher Wilmarth
Paul Wonner

 

 
© Eric Baumgartner 2017
© Eric Baumgartner 2017
© Eric Baumgartner 2017
© Eric Baumgartner 2016
© Eric Baumgartner 2016
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Online Programming

Jeanne Brousseau, Edward Deeds, Bill Traylor, Frank Walter, Purvis Young, David Zeldis

Self-taught Art



Self-taught Art (also known as "Outsider Art") rejects convention. In that spirit, we have taken a different approach in this e-catalogue, which is presented as a dialogue instead of a list of works with short essays. Frequently asked questions about this often perplexing field are answered by Tom Parker, a Director at Hirschl & Adler and a well-respected authority and lecturer on the subject. Our hope is that this format will provide an easy-to-understand introduction to an area of the market that is often confusing and difficult to approach. Better yet, we hope that it might introduce some to an exciting field that is still in the process of gestation and discovery. History is being made, right now, by the legacy of these works, and the collectors, curators, and scholars that are moved by their visionary and emotional content. For biographical information on the artists presented here, please click through the links that are embedded in the text.

Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, Meredith James

Every Lie to Truth



Trompe l’oeil, at its best, subverts our expectations. When pushed beyond pure verisimilitude, it forces us to shift our perspective both intellectually and physically. "Every Lie to Truth" brings together four artists whose work has this rare ability. For them, trompe l’oeil is a strategy to engage the viewer in the deeper discussions with which they are concerned. Truth, futility, loss, and fallibility are the subjects here, operating beneath the illusory surfaces so skillfully composed. Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, and Meredith James urge us to question what it is that we are looking at and why. In doing so, we accept every lie in order to arrive at the truth behind it. Please use the provided link to view the exhibition's e-catalog. You may also visit the gallery's website to see installation images and to learn more about the artists.

 
Past Exhibitions

James Everett Stanley

From the narrow place



March 22, 2023 - April 28, 2023
Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "From the narrow place," James Everett Stanley’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Collapsing time, space, and personhood through gestural representation and fractured picture planes, these nine new paintings stand as non-linear stories of people’s lives. Along with the depictions of his friends and neighbors on Cape Cod, the artist gives equal importance to the landscape of the area, which he sees as continually changing and constantly under threat. A sense of precarity pervades each picture, wherein each person needs to stay attuned to nature’s sudden shifts.

Amy Weiskopf

Recent Paintings



March 22, 2023 - April 28, 2023
Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present this exhibition of Amy Weiskopf’s most recent paintings, her third solo show with the gallery. Across these works, the artist’s fusion of traditional representation and modernist strategies highlights her command of the still life as both form and content. Keenly observed and deftly painted, each object in Weiskopf’s work is essential and the relationships between the objects are complex – full of tension, ambiguity and intimacy. The flattened backgrounds, made of shadowy blocks of color, provide just enough space for drama to play out. Earnest and unassuming, Amy Weiskopf’s still life paintings radiate with a power that belies their scale.

Julie Heffernan

The swamps are pink with June



February 8, 2023 - March 17, 2023
Hirschl & Adler Modern is thrilled to present "The swamps are pink with June," Julie Heffernan’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Across fifteen new paintings, the artist’s female protagonists, stand-ins for the viewer and the artist herself, inhabit lush gardens and resplendent trees. Nestled beside blooms of rich color are scenes and depictions from western art history. The Fall of Adam & Eve, Hudson River School landscapes, and portraits of Queen Victoria blossom from expansive branches. In others, dense shrubs grow from under the central figure’s skirt, rooting her to the landscape that surrounds her. Climate activism, feminism, identity and lineage are the major themes of Heffernan’s career and here they entangle in fresh and welcoming ways.

Randall Exon

Maritime



September 14, 2022 - October 22, 2022
Hirschl & Adler Modern is thrilled to open its Fall 2022 season with "Maritime," Randall Exon’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first since 2013. Twelve new paintings of quotidien moments are imbued with the artist’s celebrated sense of haunting beauty. Each one feeling all the more poignant against the backdrop of recent events. Focusing on the sea, and boats more specifically, this body of work was born out of Exon’s experiences during Covid lockdown. Needing to simply “get out of the house,” the artist began exploring the back roads of Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey, across the state line from his home outside Philadelphia. It was there that Exon found a working-class yacht club that had fallen on hard times, with dozens of old yachts out of the water, propped up on poles and jacks. Initially drawn-in by the architecture of the boats with their colorful keels fading in the sun, Exon was captivated by the timelessness of the scene. The artist would return again and again to paint what he found there, keenly understanding the allegory he was depicting. Through Exon’s masterful handling, the sense of isolation and of being outside of time, shared by many during the pandemic, is channeled into moments of wonder and peace.

Lily Cox-Richard

Soft Fists Insist



May 11, 2022 - June 24, 2022
In her metaphorical poem from 1959, "Mushrooms," Sylvia Plath extolls the humble origins and unnoticed advances of mushrooms as they overtake the forest floor through the sheer power of their communal will. This politically motivated poem resonates deeply with artist Lily Cox-Richard, whose multifaceted practice explores commodification, material agency, reuse and activism, particularly through the framework of natural elements and processes. For the artist, the vast extension of mushroom colonies acts as a metaphor for the complex networks affecting all aspects of contemporary society and culture. By titling her exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern, "Soft Fists Insist," after a line from Plath’s poem, Cox-Richard signals her intent. The artworks seen here reveal and conflate systems found in both nature and society in order to force a reset of those systems which marginalize and impede growth. This exhibition, the artist’s second with H&A Modern, is timed to coincide with the artist’s current solo show at MASS MoCA, "Weep Holes" (through January, 2023).

Angela Fraleigh, Chie Fueki, Eric Helvie, Colin Hunt, Andy Mister, Clio Newton, James Everett Stanley

A Likeness



February 16, 2022 - April 1, 2022
Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "A Likeness," a group exhibition featuring seven contemporary artists who push the boundaries of portrait painting. Often dismissed as anachronistic, portraiture plays a vital and dynamic role in each of these artists’ practice. For them, it is a strategy rather than a genre and one which elevates their work beyond a simple likeness of the sitter. While each work in the show can be solidly defined as a portrait, these paintings are also deep meditations on more abstract concepts such as labor, commodification, marginalization, grief, and displacement. These artists understand that a portrait captures the life and time of the subject, but it also encapsulates those of the artist. Understood as such, what is at once a depiction of an individual is also a broader picture of a culture and of a society. The artists find themselves echoed in the likeness of their subject and the viewer will do so, as well.

James Castle

Seeing



October 14, 2021 - November 19, 2021
A solo presentation of the self-taught artist James Castle of Idaho featuring examples from his major bodies of work: paper constructions, drawings, and hand-made books. Born profoundly deaf, Castle did not speak, read or write in any conventional way. Cut off from many sensory experiences and from most social interaction, the artist pursued a deeply personal examination of the rich visual world that extended no further than the back fence of his family’s small farm.

Sarah Braman, Louisa Chase, Lily Cox-Richard, Angela Fraleigh, María Elena González, Jenny Morgan, Howardena Pindell, Zoe Pettijohn Schade, Elizabeth Turk

Our Secret Fire



September 9, 2021 - October 8, 2021
Much more than “lead into gold,” alchemy is the pursuit of new understanding and new ideas through the manipulation of what already exists. This pursuit resonates strongly in "Our Secret Fire," a group exhibition dedicated to nine artists whose work purposefully exists between states of being, caught in the act of metamorphosis. These artists utilize the shiftiness of the liminal state to explore ideas like domesticity, production and commodification, perception, and phenomenology.

Colin Hunt

So Much Remains to Be



March 18, 2021 - April 23, 2021
Looking at a painting by Colin Hunt is like watching someone pass through a hole in our consciousness. As the landscape refracts through the sitter’s absence and fills that emptiness, the world remakes itself in the image of what has been lost. For the artist, these human-shaped portals operate between here and the hereafter, providing sublime solace in the shared human experience of grief. In "So Much Remains to Be," his debut solo exhibition with Hirschl & Adler Modern, Hunt collapses the concepts of sitter and likeness, space and time by connecting the formal traditions of portraiture and American landscape painting. The resulting panels explore a collective intuition enveloping memory, humanity and the afterlife. These themes may be heavy, but Hunt’s paintings are tender and optimistic. The people we love and lose are always with us, absorbed and refreshed in the spaces we inhabit. As the exhibition title suggests, there is so much about here and the hereafter still to be realized.

Angela Fraleigh

Fluttering still



February 10, 2021 - March 12, 2021
Is it discomfort, or excitement, that you feel when you watch these women languidly roust, or subtly drift asleep? Do you happily play the voyeur, seduced by their beauty and the opulence of their surroundings? Do you feel that nagging tug from your mind that you are being watched, as well? Angela Fraleigh has spent her career exploring narrative art’s hierarchical patterns. Keenly observing how images and roles from Western art history intersect with contemporary representation and attitudes, Fraleigh uncovers why certain tropes remain relevant, who they benefit, and how. Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present "Fluttering still," the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. In these ten new paintings, Fraleigh depicts women in liminal states between wakefulness and sleep to perfectly encapsulate today’s social and political dynamics. The women in "Fluttering still" are not here to satisfy any outdated notion of their role nor the viewer’s predatory desire. Fraleigh has awoken them within a new context, wherein their agency exists for their own, and each other’s, sake. In rearranging the images of the past, the artist changes how we see ourselves in the present. Fraleigh, deftly and subtly, empowers her subjects through a variety of strategies. Removing the original art historical context from these figures removes any “traditional” value-based judgments of femininity. In the void, Fraleigh injects additional conceptual layers. In "Shaking to sound the silent skies" and "A pang of livid light," the swirling, abstract patterning surrounding the figures comes from the fin de siècle illustrations rendered by Gerda Wegener and Ethel Reed, two female design pioneers who upended the social norms of their era. Their graphics offer Fraleigh’s figures a haven as well as a lineage. Another key element to Fraleigh’s paintings is her depiction of women together. The “sleeping woman” trope has always been about power, existing to satisfy the voyeuristic viewer. Fraleigh subverts this motif by rendering one woman noticing the other either through her gaze or through contact. This interaction closes a loop wherein there is no room for the viewer. These women are here for each other, and as a result they hold the power. Even routine formal decisions benefit the artist’s concept. While the paintings included in "Fluttering still" range from the intimate (24 x 18 inches) to the grand (90 x 66 inches), Fraleigh’s figures are always life-sized or larger. Treated this way, no woman is diminished.

Elizabeth Turk

Tipping Point—Echoes of Extinction



October 1, 2020 - December 11, 2020
As we celebrate 20 years representing Elizabeth Turk, Hirschl & Adler Modern is proud to present an exciting new project, "Tipping Point– Echoes of Extinction," the latest body of work by the internationally-recognized sculptor. While furthering her exploration into the overlap of art and nature, Turk confronts a globally important issue: Extinction. "Tipping Point" employs sculpture, sound, and technology to ask: what role can humans play in the preservation of a species, including our own? Are we at a tipping point?

Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, Meredith James

Every Lie to Truth



March 12, 2020 - April 10, 2020
Trompe l’oeil, at its best, subverts our expectations. When pushed beyond pure verisimilitude, it forces us to shift our perspective both intellectually and physically. "Every Lie to Truth" brings together four artists whose work has this rare ability. For them, trompe l’oeil is a strategy to engage the viewer in the deeper discussions with which they are concerned. Truth, futility, loss, and fallibility are the subjects here, operating beneath the illusory surfaces so skillfully composed. Rachel Granofsky, Kirk Hayes, Colin Hunt, and Meredith James urge us to question what it is that we are looking at and why. In doing so, we accept every lie in order to arrive at the truth behind it.

Frederick Brosen

Recent Watercolor Paintings



February 6, 2020 - March 6, 2020
From the Upper West Side to SOHO and out to Coney Island, Frederick Brosen paints the honest and over-looked splendor of New York City’s rainy street corners and gritty façades. Fourteen watercolor paintings, ranging in scale from 10 x 9 inches to 45 x 32 inches, celebrate the city which has served as the artist’s career-long muse and lifelong home. These paintings offer quiet moments of reflection amidst the bustle of NYC, and their skilled-handling demonstrates that Brosen is a true master of watercolor.

Louisa Chase

Force Field



September 12, 2019 - October 18, 2019

Reinventing the Reel



June 12, 2019 - August 2, 2019

Honoré Sharrer

Claws Sheathed in Velvet



April 25, 2019 - June 7, 2019

Andy Mister

On a Classic Nitrogen Afternoon



March 14, 2019 - April 20, 2019

Robert Minervini

New Monuments



March 14, 2019 - April 20, 2019

Augmenting the Canon: Recent Acquisitions of American Neo-Classical Decorative Arts



December 13, 2018 - February 6, 2019

The Masters: Art Students League Teachers and their Students



October 18, 2018 - December 1, 2018

David Ligare

Still Life



September 12, 2018 - October 13, 2018

Vis-á-Vis



June 18, 2018 - August 17, 2018

Winold Reiss Will Not Be Classified.



April 12, 2018 - June 8, 2018

Bread & Salt



March 1, 2018 - April 7, 2018