Ricco/Maresca Gallery

12/03/2022

Join us today (4-7pm) for the closing reception of “Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio,” featuring complimentary 15-minute tarot readings conducted by Laetitia Barbier / .cartomancy (for those who signed up in advance) and a wine bar for everyone else. / In association with Morbid Anatomy.
https://riccomaresca.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/90-closing-reception-grant-wallace-over-the-psychic/
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Artwork pictured: . “Les Veuves de la Mort”, ca. 1919 - 1925. Ink, watercolor, and gouache on paper. 20 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. (51.4 x 31.1 cm.)
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Wallace was born in Hopkins, Missouri, in 1868, one of 9 children. He set out for New York City at age 19, where he studied and developed his interest in the occult. Wallace eventually made his way to California, where he worked as an editorial illustrator and reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. He graduated to editorial writer for the Evening Bulletin and covered the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 among a group of war correspondents that included Jack London and Richard Harding Davis.
Just before World War I, Wallace settled with his family in Carmel, California, where he began experimenting with telepathy, or what he referred to as "mental radio.” Over the next two decades, he channeled his visions and messages into elaborate portraits, texts, and complex diagrams and calculations. Through his work, Wallace endeavored to prove reincarnation, extraterrestrial life, and the coexistence of the living with the dead.
[Artwork image © The Berger Wallace Art Collection]
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10/28/2022

FREE EVENT! We hope you'll join us Saturday, October 29 for Over the Psychic Radio: A Live, Online Symposium Dedicated to Artist and Occultist Grant Wallace, Produced in Partnership with Ricco/Maresca Gallery. Learn more and register at bit.ly/3fLyKpn.

We hope you’ll join us for a special symposium devoted to the forgotten life and work of American artist, occultist, and journalist Grant Wallace. This event is produced in partnership with Ricco/Maresca Gallery and celebrates their exhibition Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio (October 20 - December 3, 2022).

Grant Wallace (1868–1954) had a storied life before settling with his family in Carmel, California right before WWI. Here, he began experimenting with telepathy, or what he referred to as "mental radio.” Over the next two decades, Grant Wallace channeled his visions and messages into elaborate portraits, texts, and complex diagrams and calculations. Through his work, Wallace endeavored to prove reincarnation, extraterrestrial life, and the coexistence of the living with the dead.

This symposium will explore the life, work, and cultural milieu of this enigmatic creator, featuring presentations by:

🔹Curator and gallerist Frank Maresca

🔹Writer, critic, and artist Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

🔹Matt Berger, great-grandson of Grant Wallace

🔹Art Historian Susan Aberth, professor at Bard College, author of Not Without My Ghosts

🔹Robert Cozzolino, curator of Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art

🔹Practicing medium Tiffany Hopkins, who will lead us on a guided meditation allowing us to engage in some artistic channeling of our own

Ricco/Maresca’s Grant Wallace: Over the Psychic Radio is the first gallery exhibition ever to be mounted of the artist's work. It features 31 works from a collection that was recently discovered by Wallace's great-grandchildren.

Image: Grant Wallace, “A More Splendid Race" (detail), ca. 1919 - 1925, courtesy of Ricco/Maresca Gallery | © Berger Wallace Art Collection

09/10/2022

From our online programming: "William Hawkins: Drawings"
More information 👉 Link in profile
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William Hawkins’s main source of inspiration was the print media of his time, the pictures in newspapers and magazines that he retrieved from the trash stored in a suitcase.
Before starting to work on a painting, Hawkins would often work out basic compositional problems on paper. The drawings presented in this online exhibition were always meant to be the beginning of a process that was wonderfully spontaneous. When asked about art-making, the first thing the artist would say was that he had been drawing all his life. This was true. Even though he did not start painting in earnest until the late 1970s (he was always a hard, industrious worker and never had the luxury of time), drawing could be done anywhere, quickly.
It was never Hawkins's intention to sell his drawings, so he didn’t treat them with particular care—he might have been working on one while eating lunch or dinner. There is nothing "precious" about the artist's work, and this extends to his drawings. It’s also true that they are as fearless and whimsical as his paintings are.
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05/06/2022

Join us this evening at our gallery space (6-8pm) for the opening reception of "Paddy Bedford: Ancestral Present." Presenting important paintings by the late Australian Indigenous master Paddy Bedford.
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09/09/2021

The Independent Art Fair is now open. Please join us at the newly renovated Battery Maritime Building: 10 South Street, New York, NY 10004.
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Our booth this year features the work of Lidia Syroka (b. 1956), who in the last decade has embarked on a profound exploration of the concept of metamorphosis; the “alchemy” that takes place when spiritual activity causes physical transformation. The artist's own body thus becomes a symbolic conduit for construction and deconstruction.
“Series 7,” made with Chinese calligraphy paper strips and black ink on crystal paper—notable for its austere beauty—is the latest in this progression. Our booth presents works from this series—the last to be completed by the artist—in conjunction with her first, “Series 1,” which explores the body as a machine.
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03/18/2021

Play: American Game Boards, 1880 - 1940

Join us today for the opening of “Play: American Game Boards, 1880 - 1940” (12-8pm).
Digital Preview 👉 https://www.riccomaresca.com/viewing-room/21-play-american-game-boards-1880-1940-in-person-and-online/⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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From the press release:⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Aligning with Ricco/Maresca’s ongoing mission to promote the crossover of self-taught, outsider, and vernacular art into the modern and contemporary arenas, Play presents a collection of outstanding game boards made between the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Created as functional objects by unknown American artists, these examples of parcheesi, backgammon, halma, checkers, Chinese checkers, mills, and solitaire (among others) have transcended their original purpose and stand on their own as cousins of modern art.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
This exhibition decontextualizes these works to highlight their concrete beauty—and their visual affinities with minimalism and geometric abstraction, which they often precede—but it also acknowledges the mystery and gravitas that they possess as objects that once participated in everyday life.

10/28/2020

Opening tomorrow: “Leopold Strobl: ONE.” Featured in both Artnet and Artforum as a “must see.”
ALL-DAY OPENING: Oct. 29, 11am- 7pm (on view through January 9, 2021)
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“ONE” presents a selection of Strobl's most recent works—all produced between 2019 and 2020. This is the artist's second one-person exhibition after his debut at Ricco/Maresca in April of 2016. Digital preview: https://riccomaresca.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/18-exhibition-preview/
From the exhibition’s press release:
“Strobl’s process is a seamless, multilayered appropriation and alteration of a photographic base. It starts with combing through the local newspapers for evocative images that will lend themselves to the transformation that is to come. Strobl then scissors these images out of their original context and backs them with clean drawing paper. We know the steps that follow and the simple materials utilized (graphite and colored pencils), but not in what order, or if there is one--as the artist doesn't speak of it or allow onlookers when he is working. Strobl’s compositions are generally encased in a drawn internal frame that is either very subtle (delicately enclosing each scene with rounded corners) or partially amorphous, covering large areas like a spill or a flood. Depending on the disposition of the underlying clip, he traces over certain outlines--topographic features, horizon lines, architectural details, winding perspectival lines--and if there are figurative elements that don’t fit into the artist’s vision, he encloses them in graphite, like an insect spinning a cocoon, or a minimalist reducing a representational image into a basic shape ... The artist is a perceptive colorist and imbues his world with shades green, grey, yellow, blue, and ivory white--blending and layering pigment onto large areas with an eye toward the existing texture and light in the underlying photograph--so that ultimately, we don’t know where the artist’s touch ends and the found image begins.”
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10/24/2020

Closing today 🎪🧳
“C.T. McClusky: Circus Surreal”
“Visual art tends to portray the circus as a tightly circumscribed microcosm somewhat impervious to its surroundings; the place where misfits ran off to live adventurous, colorful lives, the portal through which spectators could escape to a more glamorous, intrepid dimension. McClusky captures this archetypal facet of the circus, but he also contextualizes it within a world in constant shift and confronts it with an increasingly fragmented individual experience. It is here, where this uniquely positioned artist and his wildly idiosyncratic practice meet a wider historical context, that this body of work becomes so powerful. We’ll never know what fire compelled this performer from the darkest corner of clown alley to create the oeuvre that is now his legacy, but his effort seems akin to Don Quixote’s impossible truth; the quest to comprehend one’s own experience as it navigates the threshold between fantasy and reality.”
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06/08/2020

NEW GALLERY SPACE

NEW GALLERY SPACE

02/27/2020

Join us this week at (February 27 through March 1 at the Park Avenue Armory).
As new members of Art Dealers Association of America we are participating with a historic one-person exhibition of work by the self-taught master Martín Ramírez, who produced some 500 works while confined at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, CA. Our booth design echoes the artist’s fixation with architectural forms, particularly the Rothko-like arches, tunnels, and portals repeated ad infinitum throughout his body of work.
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@ ADAA Art Show

02/26/2020

Join us this week at , organized by at the Park Avenue Armory (67th St) between February 27 and March 1. With a gala preview tonight.
Ricco/Maresca Gallery (booth A11) will present a historic one-person booth of work by the self-taught master Martín Ramírez, who produced some 500 works while confined at DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn, CA. His rhythmic drawings and collages cross over seamlessly into the modern/contemporary arenas.This presentation will include works depicting Ramírez's iconic images of arches, trains, tunnels, and caballeros--all motifs that were honored with 5 USPS® Forever Stamps in 2015.
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12/09/2019

Jeffrey Kastner on Joe Massey

Via Artforum
"Massey's compositions typically portray mul­tiple human figures simply rendered and given rudimentary, often vaguely quizzical faces. His cast of characters 'speak' to one another or to the viewer via bits of expository dialogue that take over the empty spaces of the compositions. They are frequently accompanied by crea­tures from a fantastical bestiary that creep along the margins. A dime­store reading of this vicious fauna might suggest an analogue to the deprivations and transgressions of Massey's own life. Yet even with the needlelike fangs that line their gaping maws, they read as much as shy and even gentle companions as they do menacing antagonists."
—Jeffrey Kastner

10/16/2019

Shut Up: Joe Massey’s Messages From Prison

Via the The Brooklyn Rail ↓

10/16/2019

Are Joe Massey’s Prison Drawings the Next Big Thing?

Via Hyperallergic | By Edward M. Gómez
"The Next Big Thing, which may well be the Real Thing, too, could be a recently surfaced cache of ink-on-paper drawings made by Joe Massey, a self-taught African American artist who spent the latter part of his life in jail. His unusual, vivacious creations are now being shown, through October 19, in Shut Up: Joe Massey’s Messages from Prison, at Ricco/Maresca Gallery.
This presentation kicks off the current New York exhibition season with an unmistakable reminder that, sometimes, less really is more, for there is no stopping the expressive power of a skilled draftsman with little more than a nib pen, a bottle of ink, and a deep well of imagination."
READ MORE ↓

09/10/2019

Opening tonight at Demisch Danant (30 W 12th St, 6 - 8pm): “JAZZ,” in collaboration with Ricco/Maresca. Inspired by the melodies and spirit of the 1950s in Paris, this exhibition highlights the unexplored affinities between William Hawkins’s paintings of architecture and cityscapes and French design of the 1950s. While the works on view derive from very different places of origin and eras of creation, and reside within the discrete categories of fine art and design, they are provocatively connected by the influence of postwar musical innovation and improvisation.
Pictured:
•William Hawkins. Interior with Arched Windows, 1989. Enamel on masonite. 48” x 56”
•André Renou & Jean-Pierre Génisset Pair of Armchairs, 1951. Molded plywood, oak veneer, fabric. 25.59” x 24.61” x 21.65” | Seat height: 14.6” (Edition La Crémaillère)
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@ Demisch Danant

09/10/2019

Soon on view at Demisch Danant (30 W 12th St) in collaboration with Ricco/Maresca: “JAZZ,” highlighting the unrecognized affinities between French 1950s design and William Hawkins’s paintings of architecture and cityscapes.
Pictured:
•William Hawkins. Arched Park with Nationwide No. 3, 1989. Enamel on masonite. 48” x 48”
•Geneviève Dangles and Christian Defrance. Desk, 1958. Nickel plated steel, elm, Formica. 29.53” x 68.11” x 33.46” (Unique work)
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@ Demisch Danant

09/07/2019

“JAZZ,” in collaboration with Demisch Danant opens Sept. 12 (6 - 8pm) at 30 W 12th St.
Freed from its former Napoleonic mindset and the traumas of World War II, Paris in the 1950s saw young French designers reviving modernism and promoting a forward-looking lifestyle with furniture and architectural designs for a new postwar era. At the time, African American musicians were blazing a triumphant return to Paris, picking up where their 1920s predecessors had left off. In Columbus, Ohio, William Hawkins (1895–1990) integrated a jazz sensibility into his creative process. The artist was functionally illiterate and completely self-taught; unaware of the rules of academic art practice, he was not constrained by them. His modus operandi was as improvisational, fluid, and completely instinctual.
Pictured:
•William Hawkins. What’s it Worth?, 1987. Enamel on masonite. 48” x 57”
•Michel Mortier. SF 103 Triennale Chair, 1960. Chromed metal, wood, foam, fabric. 38.19” x 31.1” x 32.28” | Seat height: 17.7” (Edition Steiner)
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09/07/2019

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to announce “JAZZ,” in collaboration with . Inspired by the melodies and spirit of the 1950s in Paris, this exhibition highlights the unexplored affinities between William Hawkins’s paintings of architecture and cityscapes and French design of the 1950s. While the works on view derive from very different places of origin and eras of creation, and reside within the discrete categories of fine art and design, they are provocatively connected by the influence of postwar musical innovation and improvisation.
Opening on Sept. 10 (6 - 8pm) at Demisch Danant: 30 W 12th St
Pictured:
•William Hawkins. OLD TOWN SQUARE No. 3, 1987. Enamel on masonite. 48” x 56.5”
•Étienne Fermigier. Desk, 1957. Aluminum structure, teak, glass top. 29.13” x 74.8” x 39.37” (Edition Meubles et Fonction)
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@ Demisch Danant

03/28/2019

[OPENING TONIGHT, 6-8pm ]

03/28/2019

Editors’ Picks: 18 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week | artnet News

"Can anything be considered art? Ricco/Maresca answers this question by juxtaposing old-fashioned board games alongside George Widener’s 'Magic Square' works to elevate these anonymously designed, turn-of-the-century objects into modern art."

Our picks include the Affordable Art Fair and openings for the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Fernando Botero, Sara Ludy, and Anton Ginzburg.

03/21/2019

Alfred Neumayr

Last few days to see "Alfred Neumayr: Mythical Creatures" [closing March 23]

This is "Alfred Neumayr" by Ricco/Maresca Gallery on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

03/11/2019

Via The Two Percent

03/10/2019

Thank you, Independent 🤝
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03/08/2019

Best Buys: Eight Artists at Independent to Collect for Under $15,000 (If You're Lucky and Move Fast) | artnet News

Via artnet: "Gil Batle is the straight-no-chaser antidote to an art world chained too tightly to an ecosystem of privilege. A self-taught Filipino-American artist who spent 20 years tumbling through the California penal system on fraud and forgery convictions, Batle honed his draughtsman skills to serve as both a currency and a protective talisman in the brutal prison-block economy.
While he’s best known for his ornate narrative carvings on ostrich eggshells—the first exhibition of which sold out “instantly,” according to gallerist Frank Maresca—Batle’s series of Playing Card drawings incorporates nearly as much technical virtuosity and storytelling power in a vastly more manageable format"

03/08/2019

Techno, Ostrich Eggs, and Icy Winds: Independent Art Fair Gets Off to a Spirited Start -

Via ARTnews: "One of the fair’s most exciting booths is that of Ricco/Maresca, which turned over its entire presentation to work by Gil Batle. The artist—formerly incarcerated in California for forging checks and troubles related to methamphetamine addiction and now based on an island in the Philippines—makes ostrich-egg sculptures that feature ornately carved renderings of strange visions. Surrounding those are drawings of imprisoned bodies amid tangles of barbed wire."

The fair opened in New York to VIPs and invited guests on Thursday. Read More

03/07/2019

Gil Batle next to . []

03/05/2019

Fragile (A Portrait of Gil Batle)

Join us at the Independent Art Fair NYC this week (March 7-10 | 50 Varick St.). Where we will participate with a one-person booth featuring the work of contemporary artist Gil Batle—the first to be mounted at any art fair.
The gallery’s presentation will explore Batle’s diverse forms of visual storytelling and revolves around a newly conceived work on paper rendered in ink and graphite. The largest and most ambitious Batle has ever produced, this horizontal panel describes a dystopian landscape condensing real and imagined geographies, the central structure in the composition depicts a monumental prison island reminiscent of Alcatraz. Also on view will be a selection of smaller and equally meticulous works on paper which have never been seen, as well as four ostrich egg bas relief sculptures (for which the artist is best known) portraying scenes and subjects from his life behind bars.

03/02/2019

Details.
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03/02/2019

Donald Kuspit on Gerald Slota

Via Artforum- Be sure to grab the March print edition of the magazine and read Donald Kuspit's insightful review of Gerald Slota's recent exhibition at Ricco/Maresca:
"The eccentric, collage-like compositions featured timeworn items from his late parent's home (crusty wallpaper, shabby kitchen tiles, a misshapen pegboard) in sensational colors (electric yel­lows, lurid greens, lambent blues). The pieces were strangely abstract--­the pegboard, for instance, became a Color Field painting, the bit of wire dangling from it an expressive gesture. The images had a certain naive and clumsy charm, a quality we would expect from the art of an autodidact. But Slota is no such thing. Though his pictures have a hesitant sophistication, they demonstrate an
acquaintance with reified modernist ideas of artmaking. The works are built step-by-step-indeed, they are a via dolorosa of mourning-and bring with them the conviction that art has healing power."