HANNAH BEERMAN, OLIVIA REAVEY

Thomas Erben is thrilled to present an exhibition of photographs by Olivia Reavey in juxtaposition with paintings by Hannah Beerman. Both artists - Reavey in her mostly black and white and Beerman in her exuberantly colored works - display the formal hallmarks of their respective craft: an attention to composition, texture, line, light as well as volume, and to painting’s additional qualities of mark making, surface, and the hand’s expressive abilities. In both works however, the body is central though in divergent ways.

In her self portraits, Olivia Reavey often contrasts her body in an assertive juxtaposition with industrial artifacts whereas in other works, she appears in scenes or performances birthed from moments of spontaneity. In these, friends or models, mostly male and often in the nude, participate in an awkward dance in which neither photographer nor subject knows the choreography. They sway and stomp across a dance floor of intimacy, intimidation, and adoration - renegotiating the complex and murky histories of photographic representation and pre-established power dynamics. Looped into this is Reavey’s photographic fixation with the phallus. Her images capture the nuances of this highly symbolic object - neutralizing any threat with abstraction, humor and her own presence. The results are images that literally and metaphorically pull at the body and relations of intimacies.

The body is also centrally present in Hannah Beerman’s paintings, with her hands, fingers, arms and anything at hand used as tools of applying paint, seismographically translating the artist’s lived experience. The studio is set up as a space of free experimentation, a sanctum teeming with all kinds of paints, materials and objects, which have found their way into the artist’s life. Though this set up is conducive to expressive spontaneity, Beerman’s paintings are physically tended to, “performed” over time, an intimate experience in which paint is probingly applied - layer upon layer or left side by side - and objects are used for their formal as well as emotional resonance.

Seen together these works offer a glimpse into a contemporary sensibility: playfully open, fluid and perhaps not fixated on a point in the future but rather partaking in an ever present.

Hannah Beerman (b. 1992) is a painter based in Brooklyn, who holds an MFA in Painting from CUNY Hunter College of Art (2019). Since receiving her BA from Bard College in 2015, she had close to ten solo shows with, most recently, Dimin and Kapp Kapp (both New York), but also with galleries in Rome and London.

This spring, Chris Martin invited her to Love Poems at Anton Kern and other group shows at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, Ortega Y Gasset, M. David, Fredericks & Freiser, as well as the Arts Center at Duck Creek (curated by Barry Schwabsky) included her work.

Interviews and reviews appeared in Cultured Magazine, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Observer, Interview, and The New York Times, to name a few, and a MacDowell Fellowship was awarded to her in 2023/24.

Olivia Reavey (b. 1998) is a photographic artist who is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at the Yale School of Art after receiving a BFA at RISD in 2020.

Her work is included in The Rose, curated by Justine Kurland, which originated at The Lumber Room, Portland, OR, and was most recently on view at the Center for Photography Woodstock, Kingston, NY. Olivia has shown at The Independent Art Fair, Yancey Richardson and Helena Anrather. Work of hers has been published in The New York Times, Matte Magazine and Vogue.