Participating artists:
Erik Benson, Paul Brainard, Pia Dehne, Hiroyuki Hamada, Elizabeth Huey, Erika Keck,
Emily Noelle Lambert, Frank Lentini, Eddie Martinez, Brian Montouri, Bryan Osburn, Kanishka Raja,
Erika Ranee, Tom Sanford, Christopher Saunders, Kristen Schiele, Ryan Schneider, Oliver Warden,
Frank Webster, Eric White and Doug Young
Allegra LaViola Gallery | 179 East Broadway | New York, NY 10002
T 917.463.3901 E gallery@allegralaviola.com
www.allegralaviola.com
Gallery hours
Wednesday – Saturday: 12-6PM
Sunday: 1-6PM
Opening Reception: October 26, 6-9PM
Allegra La Viola Gallery is pleased to present Die Like You Really Mean It, a group exhibition on view
from October 26 – December 7. The exhibition is curated by artists Paul Brainard and Frank Webster
and features new paintings and sculpture by over twenty artists living in the New York metro area.
The curators have assembled an energetic and dynamic show, where each work registers as a highly
charged expression of the individual artist. Brainard and Webster have maintained a special interest
in choosing works that register not as intentionally ironic but rather as sincerely and at times
viscerally rendered. This exhibition celebrates painting as a healthy, living, and variegated mode of
art making in New York.
The works included in this exhibition are often resistant to purely formalist and conceptual concerns,
engaging themes that extend beyond the material media of painting. Figurative and scenic elements
may invite narrative readings while color is used forcefully, liberally, or selectively. The expressive
qualities of color among the works range widely from Oliver Warden’s transformative explosions of
color, to Hiroyuki Hamada’s restrained, bi-chromatic capsule-like wall reliefs. Also of concern among
the works is the relationship between the human being and its environment, exemplified by Erik
Benson and Kristen Schiele’s depictions of inhabited indoor and outdoor settings, Pia Dehne’s
complex compositions in which figure and ground are enmeshed through lyrical patterns of line and
geometry, and Kanishka Raja’s use of pattern to unite various specific locations depicted in the same
visual space.
Atypically, this show exalts in its contrasts. The works of Chris Saunders and Brian Montouri could
best sum this up. Saunder’s paintings are slick and calm on the surface but belie an unsettling and
subversive content, while Montouri’s vision is a veritable disgorgement of expressionist storm and
bluster. Each artist pushes the medium with equal passion, but in radically different directions, with
starkly different results. This passion however is one thing all of the artists in Die Like You Really
Mean It share in common.
—Paul Brainard, Kristen Lorello and Frank Webster