81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to announce Inertia, featuring four artists whose distinctly different approaches to painting result in a shared energy and dynamism. Across a spectrum from abstraction to realism, Jenny Reinhardt, Charlotte Hailstone, Reuben Gordon, and Akiva Listman, illustrate the spirit and speed of urban life. The works on view in Inertia appear collectively as a study of the laws of motion; snapshots of suspended movement occupy a space somewhere between beginning and end.
Motion as a subject becomes apparent through geometry, perspective, and material manipulation, implying movement by an unknown actor or force. Angles, bends, and twists spark a visual dialogue. Jenny Reinhardt’s sculptural works, made with canvas under plastic sheeting, fold in on themselves and explode outward at the same time. Charlotte Hailstone’s work echoes this tension from multiple directions. Her compositions maintain a floating quality, as she depicts imagined trajectories of plexiglass forms against the negative space of the canvas. Akiva Listman’s paintings of street signs engage in a similar investigation with imagined objects in motion rendered at different perspectives and existing only within the space of the picture plane. While Reuben Gordon’s paintings portray real scenes of the Williamsburg Bridge, his expressive brushstrokes, oversaturation, and illusive light effects shake up the predictable movement implied by linear perspective.
