"Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia"
“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” opens at THERE in New York City on Saturday, June 1, 2024, with a reception 3-6 pm. “Tangibilia” is the artist’s 21st solo exhibition and his first in New York. The exhibition runs through June 8, for which the gallery will be open to the public 12-5 pm. On the 8th copies of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard (Allworth Press, 2024), which Einspruch edited, will be available at the gallery for signing.
The artist's journey took a transformative turn upon relocating from Boston to five wooded acres in southern New Hampshire in 2022. Influenced by alternative comics and American figurative modernism, Einspruch began to explore scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space. The resulting images are sourced from imagination and memory, composed intuitively, and rendered with a careful but lush application of broad areas of color. The exhibition includes recent paintings in oil and egg tempera, as well as prints in mokuhanga and white-line woodcut.
Tangibilia, explains the artist in his statement, is a coinage of painter Philip Guston to describe common objects that take on an enigmatic character when considered artistically. Einspruch’s images “coalesced around scenarios in which touch plays a meaningful role: gardening, knitting, lovemaking, the act of painting itself.” Tangibilia also connects to the physicality of paint, which Einspruch explored as a student under noted second-generation abstractionist Walter Darby Bannard.
While working as an artist and teacher out of his New Hampshire studio, Einspruch is also an art critic who contributes regularly to The New Criterion. He is a Fulbright scholar (Austria 2018-19), in which capacity he was the Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Artist-In-Residence in Vienna. He is the proprietor of Dissident Muse, which includes a publishing imprint and an online curatorial project, the Dissident Museum, which will launch in the Summer of 2024 thanks to an inaugural FAIR in the Arts Grant from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. He is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, which Allworth Press published in January 2024, and Backseat Driver by James Croak, which Dissident Muse published in December 2023. He has been blogging about art since 2000, most recently at Dissident Muse Journal at Substack.
THERE is located at 135 W. 26th Street, 9B, New York City. In the days between public hours on June 1 and June 8, it is open by appointment; contact dissidentmuse@proton.me to view the exhibition or for more information.
Quick info:
Title: “Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia”
Start date: Saturday, June 1, opening reception 3-6 pm.
End date: Saturday, June 8, with the gallery open to the public 12-5 pm. On the 8th the gallery will have copies of Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard available for signing by Einspruch, the book’s editor.
Gallery: THERE, 135 W. 26th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), 9B, New York City. Between the public hours on June 1 and June 8 the gallery is open by appointment; contact dissidentmuse@proton.me.
Press inquiries and images: dissidentmuse@proton.me
