2024 Exhibition Archive
Justin Duerr: Let the Light Live
On View September 27 - October 31, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, October 4th, 6-8pm
Meer Magazine Article
Van Der Plas Gallery is pleased to present Let The Light Live, a solo exhibition by Justin Duerr. The opening reception will take place on
Friday, October 4th, from 6 PM to 8 PM with Justin Duerr in attendance. The show will be on view from September 27th to October 20th,
2024. This exhibition marks Duerr's first solo show in New York City and his first since 2020, featuring a selection of autobiographical,
hand-drawn scrolls that have been more than two decades in the making. The exhibit’s title, Let The Light Live, comes from a recent
drawing and reflects Duerr's belief that light—both literal and metaphorical—serves as a constant counterpoint to darkness.
The show features interlocking scrolls that span over a hundred feet in length, representing Duerr’s lifelong artistic journey. He began this project in the summer of 2000 with the intention of continuing it throughout his life. His goal is to eventually connect the first panel to the
final one, creating a continuous, cycloramic artwork that encapsulates his entire existence.
Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1976, Duerr left high school at 17 and moved to Philadelphia, where he lived in squats and played in punk bands. His career path included various odd jobs, including several seasons on a fishing boat in Alaska, where he experienced an “ecstatic vision” that inspired him to start creating the scrolls.
The show at Van Der Plas Gallery includes works spanning the artist’ evolution from 1997 to the present day, including pieces created just weeks before the show. Among the scrolls are works on diner napkins, pages from zines, and his more recent standalone pieces.
In a recent Raw Vision magazine article, critic Tom Patterson described Duerr's art as “mapping out vast, complex networks, interweaving people, places, and events over long spans of time,” brought to life by his “fluidly geometric, horror-vacui structures.” The detailed, vibrant, and immersive nature of Duerr’s work has garnered critical acclaim, and this exhibition offers a rare chance to experience it firsthand.
Since the 1990s, Duerr has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including a 2019/2020 solo show at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. He is also the author of three books, including The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Worlds of Herbert Crowley, and is currently working on two new volumes, one about artist and publisher Mary Mowbray-Clarke and the other on artist-author Sidney H. Sime.
Beyond his visual art, Duerr is known for his role in the documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, which won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. He is also the frontman of the band Northern Liberties, which has been active since 2000. Their latest album, "Self-Dissolving Abandoned Universe", was recorded by renowned engineer Steve Albini in 2022.
Let The Light Live will offer a unique opportunity to view the evolution of Duerr’s art over the past two decades and dive into the fascinating mind of this multidisciplinary creator.
LeCrue Eyebrows: Thoughts Moving Forward
On View August 2 - September 8, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, August 2nd, 6-8pm
Van Der Plas Gallery is proud to present "Thoughts Moving Forward," a solo exhibition chronicling the recent paintings and previous works by Queens-based artist LeCrue Eyebrows. The show will be on display from August 2nd through August 25th. Join us for the opening reception this Friday, August 2nd, at Van Der Plas Gallery from 6-8pm.
LeCrue Eyebrows's playful two-dimensional stories have become an unmistakable feature of NYC’s streets. LeCrue Eyebrows uses his art as a form of communication — his own visual journal for the world to see. Although there is something seemingly methodical about his work, his creative process starts spontaneously and uses free-form instinctual techniques. This lack of premeditation gives his work a deeply personal originality in exploring thoughtful visceral concepts. He channels stimuli, both consciously and subconsciously absorbed, into strikingly simple yet remarkably nuanced stories on canvas.
Using acrylic paint on canvas to create geometric, monochromatic illustrations steeped in symbolism, LeCrue Eyebrows has built a style as ambiguous as it is unique. Indeed, comparisons can be drawn to the eclectic primitivism of Paul Gauguin or the iconic surrealism of Picasso. However, LeCrue Eyebrows has forged his own style, blending a controlled expressionism with a raw, imaginative authenticity, heavily influenced by the streets of New York City.
The allure of LeCrue Eyebrows’s art perhaps lies in its enigmatic simplicity. His figures and objects are recognizable in their hieroglyphic-esque design, but remain mysterious in their connotations. LeCrue Eyebrows himself remains coy about ‘the meaning’ of his work; rejecting definitions that limit the possibilities of his art’s deep symbolism, while embracing their various interpretations. LeCrue Eyebrows’s style has evolved over the pandemic, incorporating more curvature, depth and color into his work. Building upon his already considerable success, LeCrue Eyebrows continues to incorporate new motifs and symbolism into his artwork, bringing new ideas and energy to a revitalized genre of urban Neo-Primitivism.
Jason McLean: I'm as Normal as Blueberry Pie
On View May 30 - July 14 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1st 6-8pm
Van Der Plas Gallery is pleased to present I’m as Normal as Blueberry Pie, a solo exhibition chronicling the recent paintings and previous works by Canadian artist Jason McLean. Alongside select preceding artworks from the past two decades, twenty new pieces will make their gallery debut, demonstrating the evolution of McLean’s illustrative iconography.
Sources of inspiration and creative processes have remained consistent for McLean over time. However, the recent works showcased in this exhibition delightfully depart from other renderings that trace the inner workings of his mind, as depicted in earlier “mind-maps.” Though the new mixed media works and illustrations maintain McLean’s signature humorous visual lexicon and meticulous detail, the concepts portrayed in pieces such as "Bonus Direction," appear more condensed, with the imagery appearing to be reluctant at first but eventually obliging to unfurl. With the show’s title gesturing to the earliest work on view, the exhibition signifies a moment of introspection and artistic growth.
In I’m as Normal as Blueberry Pie we meet McLean as he contemplates his past, illustrates the obstacles of his present, and charts a course for the future.
Jason Mclean (b. 1971, London, ON, Canada) records his daily experiences, observations, and personal stories in a range of media, likening his work to a ‘mental map.’ His pieces are housed within the permanent collections of significant institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Over his 30-year career, he has held numerous national and international solo exhibitions in galleries and institutions. I’m As Normal As Blueberry Pie marks his fifth solo exhibition with the Van Der Plas Gallery.
Devon Marinac: Spin of the Whirled
On View: Friday, Apr 12th - Sunday, May 5th
Opening Reception: Friday, April 12th 6-8pm
“The Spin of the Whirled” exhibition showcases a wonderful series of new works mined from the depths of Devon Marinac’s life and imagination that attempt to capture a sense of vibrancy and constant pummeling action. On exhibit at Van Der Plas gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, the show is being extended in the downstairs showroom of the gallery through Sunday, May 26th.
Marinac has spent his artistic life exploring and documenting figures, their faces, their rooms, the bars, playgrounds and spaces where they drink, drift, love, laugh and lose.A well of feelings and their portrayal comes through in paintings such as the titular piece“The Spin of the Whirled”, where Marinac wanted to be evocative of the earth, the soil, the street, the stars, the sky, and waters and rivers. The foundation of this piece is at the heart of the show, a couple dancing and gesticulating as it moves into something botanical, connecting the micro with the macro. It is through these connections that the idiosyncratic personalities presented in this work and others are defined. The figures in these works wittingly interact with the objects of the landscape—screens, bottles, and books brought from the background to the forefront, guiding the viewer's eye to the intelligence on and below the surface of the autodidactic Devon Marinac and the world she creates.
Presented across a palette of many colors pushing brightly into darks and the dark and light places of our emotions, Devon uses an array of material, from acrylic to pen to pencil to cut-ups and collage to depict an atmosphere where truth comes in layered expressions of the nudity of the selves we try to hide. As we can see in “DarkPassages”, “even though the piece started from a place of depression and caustic sensibility, it eventually saw some humor glimmer out of it,” which sums up much ofDevon’s art overall. Colorful and joyful at first glance, the paintings hide an oppressive feeling of loneliness and melancholy and a thirst for recognition. It is through Marinac’s work that we are exposed —where we find each other so very human, in our day-to-day human selves and objects, bringing to life how each moment, in its nuts and bolts, is so very uncommon and ultimately beautiful.
Anne Marie Grgich: Solo Exhibition
On View: Friday, Mar 1st - Sunday, Mar 24th
Opening Reception: Friday, March 1st 6-8pm
There may be an objectively real world which exists independent of observation, some great oneness free of seemingly disconnected objects and qualities, where all the puzzle pieces of the universe fit seamlessly together. If such a state does exist, it is clearly not the commonplace experience of sentient beings. We are born and live and die in a dimension of countless multitudes of moving, swirling, clashing, harmonizing, interweaving, burning and freezing things. Some atoms attract. Others repel. They seek completion, balance. But all knowledge remains incomplete, and everything on this side of eternity continues to change, ceaselessly. The lack of completeness in any given thing affords that thing its unique qualities, defined against all the other things it is not. These are just the conditions of life, the bargain struck in order to be allowed the wonderful and terrifying experience of being alive.
The phenomenon of selective perception – summed up in a nutshell by Oscar Wilde with the aphorism that “nature imitates art,” is so latent to consciousness that it tends not to be interrogated. There is an assumed contract with reality, an assumption that any given thing is, for the moment at least, that thing. The work of Anne Marie Grgich creates a powerful spell, able to artfully undercut this comforting illusion through a cacophony of diaphanous tissues layered like sediments, an outpouring of re-purposed images. Bits of collage, scratches of drawing, pieces of fabric; cut-up, reversed, made anew. An old familiar cartoon character from some advertisement, now a ghost, perhaps living in some crackling fading transmission. Images like scarred microfilm, blurred microfiche, the feeling of collapse, and then the immense beauty realized in that same collapse. Like every paper doll in the world being sucked into a black hole, a purgatory for the detritus of human civilization. A world in which the images cease to be beholden to the species which created them and begin to live lives of their own. Faces, sometimes half-hidden, sometimes clear as a bell, made out of everything. Beckoning, repelling, at times inviting and at times demonic. Often both, possibly depending on the perception of the viewer who gazes into the fractured and re-knit kaleidoscopic whirl. A snowglobe world where shredded newspaper pictures rain down, telling endless stories which read differently to each viewer.
This is the first solo exhibit of the work of Anne Marie Grgich in New York City, and is comprised of over 80 works. This is only a tiny fraction of the artist’s body of work, with many of these pieces being completed especially for the exhibit.
Born in LA in 1961, Grgich is currently based in Tacoma WA and has spent most of her life in the Portland/Seattle area. Self-taught as an artist, her earliest forays into art-making began in childhood, with furtive explorations of painting on the inner covers of books in the family library.
While Grgich had artistic inclinations from childhood, it was a violent trauma that catapulted her into a life as a full-time artist. In 1981, at age 19, she was involved in a tragic car accident which took the life of her boyfriend, leaving her in a coma for two months. When she began to recover, she describes having to re-learn everything, over the course of the next decade. Surgeries and health complications have been part of her life since. In the context of her recovery, her work began to blossom, as she obsessively began refining her artistic approach, developing out of teenage journals which also included poetry. After becoming briefly entangled in what she describes as “a mind-controlling cult,” Grgich discovered the punk rock subculture, as a place where she could somewhat fit in as a person on an other-than-ordinary trajectory. Her forays into collage were borne of necessity, as poverty dictated that she would be short of traditional art supplies. Friends and neighbors would donate collage materials, and she began to perfect a new technique, with her collages becoming layered, far beyond what would be expected of the “traditional” collage approach. Grgich soon discovered that her work could be contextualized as Outsider Art, a genre encompassing iconoclastic artists unconnected with the “art world,” and she has enjoyed much acclaim in that artistic ecosystem.
She has been almost unbelievably prolific, obviously creating out of a profound and genuine need. Her work has garnered the attention and admiration of many galleries and collectors worldwide, including being featured on the cover of Raw Vision magazine, with accompanying article, in the Spring of 1998. She was again featured in this magazine in the Fall of 2019, and prominent Outsider Art scholar Colin Rhodes included her in a canonical overview of the genre. Her work is regularly featured at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC. Concurrent with this exhibit, her work can also be seen as part of the 2024 Fair, at the booth of Portrait Society Gallery of Milwaukee WI.
This exhibit also includes several collaborative pieces. Grgich worked on a series of collaborative purses and quilts with fellow self-taught artist Della Wells (b. 1951) during covid lockdown in 2020. The two artists have been friends for many years and their collaborations have continued to develop. There is an example of quilting done with her neighbor, Sandy Combes, and a large diptych collage overlayed atop a blueprint-machine copy of a marker drawing by Justin Duerr (b. 1976), yet another self-taught artist, who was introduced to Grgich at the Outsider Art Fair in 2023. In the spirit of collaboration Grgich has also undertaken curatorial duties, and work with musicians.
Present here is a vast array of work, as Grgich puts it “born of trash and tragedy.” But while the work may be born of trash and tragedy, it practically bleeds gemlike wonder, and uneasy joy, and inspiring determination. Books with pages so wrought they become heavy things, layers upon layers upon layers. All the pieces communicating with each other, as the tiny elements within them also speak to each other. Faces upon faces speaking of and to human frailty, bravery, and fear. Worlds within worlds within worlds, created from the ground up. Going from the inside to the out and back again.
A Poem By Anne Marie Grgich
My Dear Friend,
Betwix the antipodes of this mortal coil; to receive worship divine or be beneath contemptuous disdain, I feel that you regard me rather in the light of the latter, and isn’t it just like the world to make me incline towards the former. My prejudice dates back to the first day I laid eyes on you humiliating and subjugating the glandular ego talents prostrate before your own overweening artistic id.
Desire and Regret, if those 2 poles were football up-rites instead of opposite ends of the Earth we could score a few points in between, but the players have yet reach the field as it I have to visit the Seattle Center each day to hitch a ride on the roller coaster to catch the vicarious thrill of being around you, and sometimes at night I see speedy safelights crossing the stars in missions of purpose and the two hot dots of Venus and Jupiter, but I suppose am only star gazing linking us in constellation, feeling the gentlest tug of gravities pull.
I ask you to lunch on the flimsiest pretext but that transparent ploy was waft away like a diaphanous negligee at point of frank fact which you must of inked I was wafting in my imagination for the prospect of the capture of the proboscis of your torso in a bout of tumultuous tussling.
Can a man resist another feminine conquest? In this case its obvious he can, so the question becomes, are you a man so constrained by your own self serving satiety of circumspection that a proffered morsel of life rich pageantry is demurred as too succulent for a milquetoast mentality?
So let me ask you this, whats to stop us now in desiring something which we can both regret later on? I figured this would serve to speed things up kind of like a laxative so that we might find a niche and enjoy diversions and discussions greater in scope then just simply categorizing the rank and file of all my difficulties, legion though they may be.
Humbly yours, Anne
Fab Bohemians
On view: Feb 2nd - Feb 25th
Opening Reception Friday, Feb 9th 6-8pm
Featuring Artists
Brian Gormley
Doug Groupp
Kevin Wendall
Juan Carlos Pinto
Ed Higgins III
Consumer
Ron Burman
Ken Hiratsuka
Christopher Hart Chambers
Clayton Patterson
Van Der Plas gallery is pleased to present “Fab Bohemians”, its latest show exhibiting the works of ten different artists illustrating an array of outsider and street art concepts not typically observed. Much of the work on display represents a core group of original NYC street artists, some having been painting and creating since the 1980s. Having grown out of the East Village and Lower East Side, the power of much of the veteran art such as “Ms. Smiley” by Kevin Wedndall (aka FA-Q) and “Doo-Da Air Mail” by Ed Higgins III have developed into cult status and are highlighted and amplify the newer artists in the show, such as Doug Groupp’s “Giant Size”, exploring the edges of what an image can represent. The raw emotions and earned wisdom of these different artists, whose lives have risen and evolved along with their work and how their expressions have bloomed, present a wide palette and spectrum to be enjoyed by enthusiasts of every stripe. “Fab Bohemians” will be showing at Van Der Plas gallery Friday, February 2nd to Sunday, February 25th. There will be an opening reception the night of Friday, February 9th from 6 to 8pm.