September 12 - October 25, 2020
Kapp Kapp, New York is excited to announce its debut exhibition of Hannah Beerman (b. 1992). Delicate Rubbernecking marks Beerman’s second solo exhibition in New York and her first since graduating from Hunter College with her MFA in Fall 2019. In this new body of work, Beerman expands upon her flamboyant vocabulary and furthers her experiment with painting and material.
Known for her distinctly punk and vibrant assemblage paintings, Beerman’s process is heavily based in object. For Beerman, no material is discriminated against, therefore, every material becomes paint as all paint becomes material. “The paintings are like fly-paper,” says Beerman, “they pick up on things that are going on around them.” Paintings in this new body of work include pita bread, pins, a book sock, neti pot, and ice tray, among others. Materials are moved around, from one painting to another, before they land finally; each painting is thus genetically connected to each other painting, containing either remnants of an object once there or activating a new painting. Beerman’s assemblages, which are all worked on simultaneously, are at once a collection of memory as they are a metaphysical transformation of material to painting.
Beerman sees her paintings as hyper-personal, often losing track of the boundary between painting and self. The artist sees her practice as a conversation between herself and her paintings as much as a conversation between the paintings themselves. Beerman playfully describes her paintings’ changing moods and personalities, noting that some days a painting can be feeling “shy” or “in love with another painting,” while two others could be “feuding.” As with Carol Rama’s Bricolage works of the 1960s, or the kinetic works of the late Carolee Schneemann (who was a friend of Beerman’s), the works at once combine heartbreak and humor.
In Beta Imposter, 2020 Beerman pins a fake loaf of bread on to a blue underpainting, with a paper cut-out of Rama’s 1995 Keaton. The Cameraman, a later figurative painting with Rama’s signature tongues. Beerman playfully appropriates Rama’s work, as much resituating Rama’s image into a flirtatious context as creating an icon to the legendary artist, one of Beerman’s favorites and a major visual influence.
Beerman’s Waterproof Reversible, 2020 contorts a plush, yellow and red reversible sleeping bag, engulfing a bare stretcher bar. The artist suspends two ceramic tea cups from the top of the stretcher, dangling from a thin rope just above the sleeping bag, evoking a parachute and cord. Beerman’s composition perfectly balances the tension between the fragile ceramics and the soft cushion of the bed spread. As in other examples of Beerman’s work, the artist uses collected material as a painterly tool– for Beerman, the motion and rhythm of the material is indistinguishable from paint.
Delicate Rubbernecking will be on view at Kapp Kapp, New York through October 25.
Hannah Beerman (b. 1992, Nyack, NY), lives and works in New York and received her BA at Bard College and received her MFA from Hunter College. She has exhibited at Kimberly Klark, Brooklyn, NY; As of Now, Brooklyn, NY; and Monica King Contemporary, New York, NY. In 2020 Beerman was a resident at the Macedonia Institute in Chatham, New York.