New Fall Season at NM
Norte Maar kicks off its fall season of programming with a two solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artists and a new collaborative ballet!
Norte Maar, Max Estenger, new paintings, Cypress Hills, Brooklyn
Max Estenger (Sept 9-Oct 15)
Opening Reception: Sat, Sept 9, 6-9pm
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For the past three decades, Max Estenger has been developing new possibilities for abstraction. Utilizing a rigorous formal language as the driving force, his painted objects are involved in conversation with art history and the ongoing dialogue with the various parameters of abstract painting—formal, material and ideological. Estenger’s work brings together a visual clarity, integrity, and moral dimension with a tough-minded tenacity, fusing a serious study of direct experience with aesthetic gratification.
In this exhibition, Estenger continues his juxtaposition of disparate materials—raw canvas, stainless steel, clear vinyl and wood panels—to create multi-paneled works. The resulting interplay of surface, structure and color refine certain aspects of his practice while celebrating paint and color as never before in his work. Polarities such as hard/soft, opaque/transparent, painted/unpainted, matte/glossy, inside/outside, actual/virtual, etc. abound and become the content of the work.
Max is a resident of Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.
Emily Berger, Norte Maar
Emily Berger (Oct 21-Nov 19)
Opening Reception: Sat, Oct 21, 6-9pm
Emily Berger is an abstract painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Brown University, attended the Skowhegan School and received an MFA from Columbia University. She has been awarded several art residencies and exhibited widely, including in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogota, Colombia, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Kent State University in Ohio, and the National Academy Museum in New York City which awarded her the John Hultberg Memorial Prize for Painting. She is included in the American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio, an exhibition of which is currently traveling to university galleries around the country. Her work has been favorably reviewed in several publications and is included in many private and public collections.
MARTHA (The Searchers)
a new ballet by Julia K Gleich
décor by Elana Herzog
Oct 27-29
Mark Morris Dance Center, Brooklyn
with prelude performance by konverjdans
“Martha, akin to ballet’s Giselle, is an iconic figure broken on the wheel of the American West.”
A modern Western, the ballet’s title character Martha is inspired by one created by American novelist Alan Le May and brought to the big screen by director John Ford in The Searchers (1956). Set in the 1860s Southwest territories of the United States, audiences will be introduced to the title role of Martha (played by multiple female leads). Other narratives include The Confederate, The Comanche, Britt Johnson (c.1840-1871), Cynthia Ann Parker or Nadua (c.1825-1871) and Quanah Parker (c.1845-1911) and The Settlers.
In Gleich’s choreography Martha is a composite of both courageous and tragic women in history. Her struggles and experiences are central to the ballet offering an alternative narrative to the roles women played in an unsettled West. For Gleich’s ballet visual artist Elana Herzog captures the palette of the Southwest and John Ford’s cinematography, using fabric remnants that suggest landscapes contrasting with the symbols of domesticity—aprons and blankets, carpets and rugs. Herzog designs a confusion of contexts, bringing the domestic into the theatre with hints of scale of vast landscape. She creates worlds in which all the identities of Martha can be viewed—all just as rough, tough, and textured as the West once was.
