Bread & Salt

New Home. New Works. New Endeavors.

The tradition of bringing bread and salt to a new home signifies hospitality and luck. H&A Modern is thrilled to welcome everyone to our new home in the Fuller Building with this inaugural exhibition, Bread & Salt.  New works by gallery artists María Elena González, David Ligare, Andy Mister, John Moore, Stone Roberts, Elizabeth Turk, and others will be on view.  In addition, we proudly announce H&A Modern’s representation of the Estates of Louisa Chase and Honoré Sharrer, and we are pleased to present their work in this show.

Throughout her career, Louisa Chase (1951-2016) remained a questing spirit, freely experimenting with various media. Her oeuvre incorporates a variety of approaches at different times, so that, despite having attracted a number of labels, such as “new image school” and “neo expressionist,” there is no singular “Chase style.” What never wavered was the artist’s intention to make visual on canvas her inner emotional state. Chase was recognized early in her career and her work was included in a host of important group exhibitions, including Barbara Rose’s 1979 manifesto at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, “American Painting: The Eighties;” the Whitney Museum Biennial in 1982; and the American group contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1984. Chase’s work attracted serious and positive notice in the art press by The Village Voice, The New York Times and Arts Magazine, among many others. Chase’s work is represented in the permanent collections of a number of noted museums—the Whitney Museum of Art, New York;  the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. In 1991, Chase moved from New York City to Sag Harbor, on the eastern end of Long Island, and then to nearby East Hampton. Louisa Chase died in 2016 after a seven-year-long struggle with cancer.

In 1949, Mademoiselle Magazine named Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009) “Woman Artist of the Year.” In 1951, she had a solo exhibition at New York’s prestigious Knoedler Gallery, where her five-panel work, Tribute to the American Working People (1946–51), attracted favorable critical praise. Indeed, the first dozen years of Sharrer’s career promised a successful, high profile future. And indeed, Sharrer worked as an artist for the rest of her life, producing a body of accomplished and impressive paintings. But the acclaim faded, done in by a combination of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s wave of repression, by Sharrer’s adherence to figural art in the face of the dominance of abstract expressionism in the 1950s and ‘60s, and by the fact that the artist was a woman. Her “rediscovery,” after her death, and recent touring museum exhibition, A Dangerous Woman: Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer (Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA), are similarly the result of social forces that are now encouraging the reexamination of an under-recognized body of work and of major talents unfairly ignored. Her work can be found in many notable public collections across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, and the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA.

Bread & Salt opens at Hirschl & Adler Modern on Thursday, March 1 and runs through Saturday, April 7, 2018.  Located on the 9th floor of the Fuller Building, at the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue, Hirschl & Adler Modern is open Tuesday through Friday, from 9:30 am to 5:15 pm, and Saturday, from 9:30 am to 4:45 pm.