Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to announce The sum of all parts an exhibition featuring Nell Blaine, Shirley Jaffe, Jess (Collins), Sarah McEneaney and Trevor Winkfield. This is the second annual summer exhibition to explore thematic links between artists in the gallery's program. The current exhibition consists of five large-scale works that explore fragmentation and cohesion: included are collage, paintings with collage and collage-like paintings. Each demonstrates strategies and building blocks in each artist’s approach to picture making.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jess's large-scale paste-up, A cryogenic consideration; or, sounding one horn of the dilemma [Winter], 1980, (pictured above) made from hundreds of collage elements with the Dutch Golden Age painting Man in a holden helmet, a work formerly attributed to Rembrandt, now his circle, superimposed on the Matterhorn, surrounded by intricate images from classical antiquity to modern life, demonstrating the density, complexity, and dispersion of popular culture and philosophical inquiry in Jess’s work. Winter is one of four works from Jess’s Seasons series. Contrasting to this work is Shirley Jaffe's The chinese mountain, 2004-05 (pictured below), where simplification and delineation coalesce in pure abstraction. Maybe this mountain exists as a Platonic ideal, or as a set of forms in perfect equipoise.

Trevor Winkfield's Mermaid’s revenge, 1993, is divided into brightly colored, hard-edge sections that fuse Pop and Surrealism. The central image is a mermaid with a Greco/Roman head and a pineapple tail. Nell Blaine’s Street encounter, 1950, is a cubist-inspired painting from a brief, important period in the 1950s when the artist’s work went from pure abstraction to figurative and representational work. Sarah McEneaney’s work, Summer studio, 2021, is part collage, part painting. The work is a self-portrait of the artist in her studio surrounded by her own paintings and drawings. The paintings on the walls and tables are computer-generated reproductions collaged into the painting. Although many of the works may have long left the studio, they will always exist together as parts of a greater whole of the artist’s life and work.