Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of paintings by Mario Naves. This will be the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

The title of the exhibition pays homage to Naves’s Queens-based studio of twenty-five years, as well as to the surrounding community of artists whose workspaces have been displaced by the current boom in real estate.

“The influence of one’s environment,” states Naves, “can’t be understated. Whether one is working in the light-drenched streets of Venice, the tropical splendor of Tahiti or the less glamorous precincts of New York City, an artist absorbs the particulars of the immediate vicinity. Whether consciously set into motion or through less overt means, a specific sense of place—its light and space, architecture, coloration and even social character--winnows its way into the imagery. Long Island City has, until recent years, been a haven of surprising quietude and gritty idiosyncrasy. I like to think these qualities are embedded within the structure of the paintings.”

Naves’s acrylic-on-panel paintings are arrived at through an improvisatory process that welcomes a variety of inspirations, including commercial signage, vintage comic strips, Indian miniatures, early Netherlandish painting, mid-twentieth century design, and the cut-and-paste rhythms of our digital age. “The older I get,” writes Naves, “the more mysterious the process of art-making becomes—the more allusive in associations, infinite in possibilities, and exciting in its conundrums.”

Using modernist means in the aim of transcending modernism’s limited scope of reference, Naves looks to the entirety of history and across disparate cultures in the hopes of channeling a sense of art’s sweep and density.

Mario Naves is an artist, critic, curator and teacher who lives and works in New York City. He is a member of the faculties at Hofstra University, Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College. Naves is the recipient of prizes and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The George Sugarman Foundation, the City University of New York and other institutions. His art has been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, The Village Voice, The New York Sun, ArtCritical, Time Out New York and other venues. Naves’s writing has been published in The New York Observer, City Arts, The New Criterion, Slate and The Wall Street Journal.