ALONE TOGETHER
Benjamin Degen | Hope Gangloff
March 13 - April 11, 2021

Mother Gallery is pleased to present Alone Together, a two person exhibition of work by Benjamin Degen and Hope Gangloff. The show features recent paintings by Degen and Gangloff. Alone Together runs from March 13 through April 11, 2021. Mother Gallery is located on the ground floor of 1154 North Avenue in Beacon, New York.

Alone Together opens one year after social distancing began in the city and upstate. During this time, Ben and Hope condensed both of their art studios and living space into Hope’s art studio apartment in Beacon, NY. The work presented in Alone Together was made over the course of a year in transition and isolation. Degen and Gangloff have been making art together for 25 years, Alone Together will be their first two person exhibition together.

Degen and Gangloff are adept at gathering psychovisual material from their environment. They bear witness and record the moment. Alternating between a concentrated, critical assessment of space and a relaxed, receptive, nonjudgmental openness to experience—allows them to transmute their observations into confident paintings that pulsate with life force. Built in layers of kaleidoscopic color and rhythmic mark-made poetry, each painting in Alone Together echos Mary Oliver’s assertion that “attention without feeling is only a report.”

In Owl, Degen captures the supra-sensorial experience of encountering an owl swooping overhead past the bare birch woods. A circling moon—a source of personal reflection for Degen over the past year—shines bright in each painting, casting chimeric color across the nightscape. To make these memories of being alive in a moment—concrete—Degen devised a method of building his paintings from layers of painted mulberry paper, cut into shapes and assembled interwoven to generate the final gestalt.

Squall on Lake George depicts a boat house surrounded by pine trees—a familiar summer setting for Gangloff, who has fond memories of gathering with close friends every summer for a week. The boat house is pictured standing weathering a pounding squall, in gradients of fading sun light. Gangloff reveals the structure of the building with lines that alternate color across fields of flying raindrops. It appears as if the painting is composed in a range of blue hues but as you look closer, you may observe that the composition’s predominant colors could actually be green and purple. In Gangloff’s paintings, colors give birth to new colors, rendering the quotidian—sublime.

-Paola Oxoa, March 2021