TURN Gallery is pleased to present Diamond Window, a three person exhibition with artists Maria Calandra, Erik den Breejen, and Christine Heindl, opening on Wednesday, September 14th. Although divergent in subject and approach, Calandra, Den Breejen, and Heindl share an overt embrace of strong color, intricate detail, and figure/ground subversion. A tension between formal rigor and idiosyncrasy runs through the work.


                                                No regrets, coyote. – Joni Mitchell


Shimmering optical joy

It’s sometimes called psychedelic, but everything you see here is the result of observation, imagination, and living in reality with open eyes and hearts. Calandra’s depictions of the landscape seem to be moving because nature is alive. The pattern, geometry, and optical confusion of Heindl’s and Den Breejen’s paintings stem from existing visual phenomena, a desire to make wholeness from halves, or visualize sound. These artists do not intend to represent or depict nature, but to realize in paint the intensity of experiences found in the real world.


Bricklayers

Over a decade ago, Christine, Maria, and Erik were talking with a few other painter friends at a group show they were all in. Someone brought up the idea of craft, and there were complaints about overly conventional painters justifying their work with some pre-existing notion of the craft of painting. But Christine had a different idea. She turned it around and said that Erik’s painting, which consisted of hundreds of evenly spaced blocks of text, looked to be very well-crafted. In fact, she continued, it looked like it was made by a really good bricklayer. And maybe it’s this particular sense of craft that unites all three artists—an interest in forms not always associated with “high art,” like weaving, cooking, sign painting, quilting, brewing, gardening… The three share a dedication to the process, and the labor required, while seeking to somehow say something new, personal, and timely within such an ancient medium.


Maria Calandra (b. 1976, London, England) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA in Painting from Cornell University in 2006 and a BFA in Painting from Ohio University in 1999. She has had solo exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021), and Heroes Gallery, New York, NY (2021). Group exhibitions include Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY, G/ART/EN Gallery, Como, Italy, Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY, Shrine Gallery, NY, 1969 Gallery, NY, and Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA. She has been reviewed and written about in Time Out New York, The Washington Post, The New York Sun, and The New York Times and featured in Maake Magazine, FUKT Magazine in Berlin, and ArtMaze Magazine.


Christine Heindl (b. 1960, Rochester, New York) has shown her paintings in numerous venues including White Columns, Curt Marcus Gallery, and Clementine Gallery in New York, Schema Projects and Songs for Presidents in Brooklyn, and most recently at Eli Ridgway Gallery in Bozeman, Montana. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and a Joan Mitchell Grant for Painting in 2009. She lives and works in Queens, NY.


Erik den Breejen (b. 1976, Berkeley, California) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been featured in group shows at Miles McEnery Gallery, NY, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Ampersand Gallery, Portland, OR, Essex Flowers, NY, and solo shows at Freight + Volume, NY. Den Breejen’s large-scale public works include murals commissioned by Atlantic Records, Public Art for Public Schools, and Rag and Bone. Erik is a 2018 MacDowell Fellow, a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Painting, and a three-time recipient of the DNA Artists Residency in Provincetown, MA. His work has been reviewed or featured in The New York Times, Artnews, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Art Maze, Maake, and Whitehot.


Diamond Window opens on Wednesday, September 14th with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, and will run until Thursday, October 20th. TURN Gallery is located on the second floor of 32 East 68th Street NY, NY 10065. Our hours are Wednesday—Saturday 12 to 6 pm. Masks are required in the gallery. For further information, contact Annika at ap@turngallerynyc.com