AS ABOVE, SO BELOW
Hannah Beerman and Rafael Vega
Curated by Barry Schwabsky
July 23 - August 21, 2022

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As Above, So Below juxtaposes works by two New York-based artists, Hannah Beerman (b. 1992, Nyack, NY) and Rafael Vega (b. 1979. Yabucoa, PR) whose approach to painting is based on an often playful, sometimes aggressive, always inventive approach to the pictorial support or surface. Rather than respecting the picture plane as an ideal to be re-emphasized or on the contrary ignoring it in favor of an illusory space, they dig into it to unearth what lays behind or pile materials atop to construct in three dimensions. Whether above or below the surface, there’s always more to discover.

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 (& is represented by) Kapp Kapp, NY; High Noon, NY; and Kimberly Klark, Brooklyn, NY.

Rafael Vega (1979. Yabucoa, Puerto Rico) lives and works in New York and Puerto Rico. After completing his BS-Industrial Chemistry (2003) and BA-Painting (2007) at the University of Puerto Rico, he received his MFA with a major in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. He also writes regularly for such publications as New Left Review and Artforum (where is co-editor of international reviews). He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College (University of London), among others. His most recent books include collections of poems, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, New York, 2015) and literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2018). In 2016 Verso (New York and London) published The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, a selection of Schwabsky’s art criticism from The Nation. Schwabsky recently released his fourth book of poetry Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, New York, 2022).