Allison Maletz: "Together", at the Christopher Henry Gallery

Press Release
Allison Maletz: Together
February 28 – March 24, 2013. Opening Reception: February 28, 6-9pm.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday 11 – 6, Sunday 12 – 6, Monday and Tuesday by appointment.

Christopher Henry Gallery 127 Elizabeth Street NY, NY 10013

Telephone: 212.244.6004
Email: [email protected]


The Christopher Henry Gallery is pleased to present “Together,” its first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Allison Maletz.

Maletz began as a documentarian, traveling the world making photographs about being ordinary, yet misplaced. As a painter her works are much more than just painterly, illustrative recreations of photographs, they are metaphors for the hidden underbelly of the western nuclear family. Maletz transforms the temporal objectivity of her source photographs and brings them into a protected present, enabling them to reach to a wider sphere of imagination beyond the totality of their original physical and emotional experience. Her narrative constructions serve more as contemporary daydreams - everyday life is elevated and transformed into a distinctly American mythology; cinematic, dramatic and mysterious. Archetypes of the everyday, Maletz’ subjects seem to hover in a liminal world poised between reality and fantasy, their fractured imperfection imbued with a sense of beauty and warmth.

Combining a strong sense of color with an eye for the graphical gesture, Maletz’ images vibrate with a subversive formality reminiscent of William Eggleston’s documentations of Americana. Maletz’ unorthodox composition and proportion, cropped images, and dismembered subjects inform the viewer that there is something amiss. She paints multiple complex patterns shrouding her subjects in a descriptive chaos. Puddles of watercolor stain and soil her subjects, imparting an unnatural, yet soulful sensation that suggests an otherworldly significance. They speak to the fluidity of the subconscious histories, myths, and desires that animate us all, testament to the stuff of our dreams percolating into the light of day.