Arsty Foundations Fair

July 11 - August 8, 2023

Featuring work by Ginnie Peterson and Michele Riche
View our booth here.

M.David & Co. is pleased to participate in the Foundations fair with our booth The Soft Light Between the Shadows. We are excited to feature and bring to a larger audience the work of Ginnie Peterson and Michele Riche. While Riche works in oil on canvas and Peterson in mixed media and sculpture, both artists question and subvert the narrative of stereotypical domestic gender roles.

Ginnie Peterson’s “Never in Lieu of Flowers” series is deeply poetic work that is simple, complex, and enigmatic. It holds so many reads and interpretations - a language that is familiar yet unknown all at once. From the French Nature Morte - "dead living" or "still life," derived from the Dutch equivalent "stilleven", romance languages used the term, "dead nature". As the popularity of still life painting spread throughout Europe, stylistic differences developed between art created in northern and southern Europe, becoming coded messages for class structure, death and sexuality.

Tremulous and beyond precise in its detail, immediacy of hand and touch, charged with conceptual rigor that embraces and repudiates 17th through 19th century still life and 20th century modernism all at once, “Never in Lieu of Flowers” extends those traditions borne out of the artist's most personal and intimate needs. As with many contemporary artists, this reinvigoration of this genre focuses and weaponizes issues of gender roles and race in the 21st century.

As the late great Klaus Kertess wrote in his essay for the 1995 Whitney Biennial, “Art is a platform for experience, not a lesson. What is being proposed here is not a return to formalism but an art in which meaning is embedded in formal value. An acknowledgment of sensuousness is indispensable — whether as play or sheer joy or the kind of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn.”

In the series "A Day At The Beach, Brighton", Michele Riche continues the tradition and themes found in the work of Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl and Alex Katz. They share an exploration of the social themes of class, and isolation in post war America, staged in public places. In these masterfully realized paintings, with their exquisitely sensitive dispassionate touch, Riche creates a complex visual equivalency of distancing and anonymity.

A New York City resident for many years, it took Riche 25 years of living in NYC to discover Brighton Beach and when she did, it became her summer sanctuary. Growing up she had gone to the beaches of New England that were beautiful and were overflowing with families and gear and picnics and fun. Her life didn’t fit that.

Her beach experience was quiet and solitary as it seemed to be for many of the other women at Brighton Beach. This was not, however, a deserted beach. Surrounded by others, some in groups , some couples, these women were most vulnerable in their near nakedness and yet comfortably armed with a sense of privacy. Who are these women, what are they thinking about? Are their lives filled with joy, obligation, or a quiet desperation to escape their roles and responsibilities?

Foundations, a new online fair curated by Artsy, spotlights fresh works from tastemaking galleries known for supporting emerging artists. This year’s fair includes presentations from more than 100 galleries across four continents, featuring rising and underrecognized talents from across the globe.

Artsy is the largest global online marketplace for discovering, buying, and selling fine art by leading artists. Artsy connects 4,000+ galleries, auction houses, art fairs, and institutions from 100+ countries with more than 2 million global art collectors and art lovers from 190+ countries. Artsy makes purchasing art welcoming, transparent, and low-friction with industry-leading technology that connects supply and demand safely and securely at a global scale. Launched in 2012, Artsy is headquartered in New York City with offices in London and Berlin.

Ginnie Peterson is a contemporary sculptor who mines her decades of experience with floral artistry and working in her father’s prosthetics lab to create still lives which capture the moment between existing and mortality. She has had recent shows in Chatham, NY, The Gallery off Main in Wellfleet, MA and has work in private collections. Ginnie’s work with flowers and design has been featured in Architectural Digest, Better Homes and Gardens.

Michele received her BFA at St. Lawrence University and continued her education in New York City, taking classes at The School of Visual Arts, among other institutions. In 2018, Michele left her job in non-profit development to pursue her painting full time. Michele has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions and had a solo exhibition at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT in 2019. Michele was born in Ridgefield, CT, where she now lives.