In Street Life, C24 Gallery Director and Curator David C. Terry has assembled a collection of paintings and sculpture that explores multiple facets of New York City through the history, inhabitants and byproducts found in its streets. The resulting dialog between the city’s legacy of racial disparities, the assortment of lone souls who comprise its citizenry, and the physical detritus of its endless activity offers viewers a variety of visceral takes on this most fascinating and intricately layered metropolis. The works by Lisbeth Firmin, Coby Kennedy and Ryan Sarah Murphy will be on view at C24 Gallery from July 23rd through September 25th, 2021, with an opening reception on Friday, July 23rd from 6-8pm.
Lisbeth Firmin works in a subdued palette, using blocks of color to recreate moments of lone figures and couples lost in thought, walking through shadows or lit by the unearthly glow of a city sunset. Her figurative paintings allude to portraiture, though she avoids the direct gaze of her subjects, focusing instead on their backs, their distraction, their movements through scaffolded sidewalks and neighborhood side streets. Building the shapes of her figures with thick brushes in gradual layers, sometimes as many as 20, her paintings come into being slowly, much like the slow development of a photograph. Her process embodies the quiet, introspective energy of her look back at the city she made her home for over 30 years. As a counterpoint to her richly colorful oil paintings, her black and white monoprints are stripped down versions of these urban scenarios, their negative space etched out from the black ink-covered plates she uses to press them into being. In both her paintings as well as her lithographs, Firmin delivers an outside insider’s view of some of the most intimate moments happening every day on the streets of New York City.
Read more about this 2021 show at C24 Gallery website.
