RUSSELL FLOERSCH | FOUR D | AL’S OFFICE
June 2 - July 26, 2024
The three new pegboard works evolved from a long-running practice of altering household retail packaging kept after a product was consumed. These works extend an interest in absence, or an attempt to reconstruct or reimagine what’s missing. Earlier work from the 1990’s used found edited photographs with missing physical and visual information. This perforated material is associated with display of retail products, packaged in hyper-designed formats to get our attention and to associate a product with a familiar design and color scheme. Although many formats of metal hooks are used to support, hold, and present these products, I preferred to craft the hooks in wood or wire, often painting them to key to the objects. I have never paired the two elements to avoid the obvious association, but wanted the pegboard support to be evoked/implied. In using masonite pegboard as a starting point and painting support, it’s the trappings of the retail display, and the packaged products, that are absent. These works embody a personal tendency to locate connections to past work, and to combine past with present and the possible future.
This is Russell Floersch’s third show with 57W57 ARTS. He was a 1983-84 Fulbright Fellow to West Berlin, and was represented by Civilian Warfare Gallery and Stux Gallery. He was a 1996 NYFA Grant recipient and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2010. He taught at City College/CUNY and Hastings College, and has recently moved his studio to the Catskills.
WAITING ROOM + PROJECT SPACE
RUSSELL FLOERSCH | Two things together
On view: March 7 - April 18, 2019
NEW YORK – 57W57Arts is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Russell Floersch, which will span both our Waiting Room and Project Space galleries. Melanie’s Office will feature a dynamic pairing of works by Letitia Quesenberry and Rolf Siegenthaler. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, March 7th, and the exhibitions will be on view to the public through April 19th.
Many of the works in Russell Floersch’s “Two things together” are made from discarded packaging that once presented and housed everyday retail objects, as well as used plastic cups and foam supermarket food trays. Other material components include un-stretched canvas and felt, remnants from the studio, or found pieces discarded by other artists. Some works are paired in an effort to create a kind of station, installed to investigate the interactions of two discrete works, seen as one. Some of the combinations are produced by the overcrowding of materials in the artist’s studio, and some are the result of comments made by colleagues during studio visits or by the positive reactions to Instagram postings that capture the studio view of a group of works in-progress. For the past 25 years Floersch has engaged in an ongoing investigation honoring loss in found photographs. These photos occasionally appear in this group of work, and have been instrumental in the artist’s thematic use of materials typically ignored or thrown away.
Russell Floersch received his BFA from Buffalo State College and his MFA in painting from the University of Buffalo, SUNY. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 1983 he travelled to West Germany on a Fullbright Fellowship. Floersch’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Elizabeth Stone Harper Gallery at Presbyterian College, Kathryn Markel Gallery, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Galerie oqbo (Berlin) and Pavilhao Branco – Museu da Cidade (Lisbon). Solo exhibitions include “Field Painting” and “New Work” at Stux Gallery; “Hella” and “from Denim” at Rooster Gallery; and “Unseen”, Floersch’s first one-person exhibition with 57W57Arts back in 2015.
MAIN GALLERY + WAITING ROOM
RUSSELL FLOERSCH | Unseen
On view: November 5 - December 18, 2015
57W57Arts is pleased to present “Unseen,” a solo exhibition of paintings by Russell Floersch. The title owes some of its meaning to several works that were begun twenty years ago and never exhibited. In our Waiting Room project space, Floersch shows for the first time, a group of small canvasses he characterizes as Reconstructions. Although most of these were begun in 1997, many have been completed in the last few years. They combine found photo fragments that are taped to the surface of small abstractions. Floersch uses a flat paint meant to evoke humble wall surfaces, and typically reworks paintings for several yearspartly out of a restless search, and because he identifies with what Chantal Akerman might have meant by characterizing repetitive everyday acts and gestures as a “dailiness.” The Reconstructions share a pictorial commonality: a pair of cropped figures who make contact through their hands. Their titles are all prefaced with this thematic description: “Clasp.” Floersch strives for a naturalness in the final state of the workas if the painting and its surface were something you might encounter in your everydayespecially as it relates to the buildup of paint through repeated application by a tradesperson covering a surface simply to protect it or introduce a different color.
In the Main Gallery of 57W57Arts, the focus shifts to more current work. Throughout this group, the repeated layering of thin applications of the same color results in a blanketlike surface, the small relief elements and their sharper features often obscured. “The works bear the accretion of many layers of paint, built up to become an index of the span of time, of memory, and of the act of making that each of them seeks to preserve. The objects of this makerly process become transformed in the process, as they oscillate in a twilight space between thing and image.” (Beth E. Wilson, “from Denim,” exhibition essay for Rooster Gallery, NY, April 2014)
Since the mid1980’s Floersch has been interested in painting as labor; responding to and collaborating with objects and images, often of unknown authorship; and the notion of specific interior place as a subset of landscape.
Russell Floersch is represented by Rooster Gallery, NY.