Founded by David Lasry in New York City in 1994, Two Palms works with some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists to publish prints and sculpture multiples in its studio and showroom in SoHo. Two Palms upends codified notions of what a print could or should be by utilizing a constantly expanding roster of tools and technologies while maintaining an expertise in traditional techniques such as etching, silkscreen, and monotype. Two Palms seeks to expand and nurture the practices of the artists with whom we work by creating a collaborative studio environment and bringing their work to a wide audience.
Two Palms is a regular participant in The Armory Show, IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, and Frieze Seoul. Two Palms’ works have been acquired by numerous institutions including The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Modern Museum of Art, New York; The Broad Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Tate Modern Art Gallery; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Ana Benaroya, The Swans, 2023.
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Cecily Brown, The Five Senses (Sight), 2023
Two Palms is pleased to present a mix of traditional and experimental printmaking at this year's Fine Art Print Fair, featuring new works by Ana Benaroya, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Carroll Dunham, Chris Ofili and R. Crumb.
Ana Benaroya’s latest silkscreen draws inspiration from the cosmos with a row of high-kicking women can-canning across the sky, depicted as you might expect to see Orion anthropomorphized in diagrams of the constellations. The print features 19 layers of luminous color and gold and silver leaf that make the stars shimmer.
"What Am I Doing Here?," Mel Bochner’s latest exploration of his iconic Exasperations works, shows the artist achieving unprecedented physicality and material experimentation. Utilizing techniques developed at Two Palms, each work in this new series is rendered entirely as one piece of cast and pigmented paper, the text jutting out several inches toward the viewer. Rendered in shades of black and white, the sculptural form of these works shine without the overwhelming impact of color. The repetition of text and the tonality of the colors creates a quietness that invites the viewer to focus closely on light and shadow.
Utilizing her unique blend of figuration and abstraction, Cecily Brown's new etchings reference "The Five Senses," a collaborative series of allegorical paintings made in the early 1600s by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Set in interiors that feel at once both grand and claustrophobic, Brown uses the work of these artists as a starting point to explore ideas of excess, her figures set amongst chaos as they paint wild animals from life and indulge in a drink poured by death.
In his long history of printmaking Carroll Dunham has developed a method to translate his graphite drawings into etchings utilizing traditional techniques such as soft-ground and aquatint. In "Negatives," Dunham returns to a familiar subject, the bathing woman and the voyeuristic male, depicting both in white ink on a black background. Further consideration is always given to the paper, in this case a blue watercolor paper serves as a base and accentuates the white highlights in the print.
Since 2006, Chris Ofili has worked with Two Palms on various series, embracing the unknown outcomes of printmaking to devise unexpected methods for creating monoprints and etchings. Ofili’s "Pink Daydream of a Faun" portfolio uses the Suminagashi Japanese paper marbling technique to create unique chine collé backgrounds for etchings based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem of the same title. The abstract background Ofili creates with the Suminagashi paintings evoke the dreamlike state of the just awoken fawn as he attempts to reconcile whether the encounter with nymphs he recalls is a dream or reality. Ofili interpreted Mallarmé’s poem through his own context and surroundings, choosing colors that reflect the volcanic ash and coral pink sand of Barbados.
Finally, Two Palms is pleased to present its first etching project with R. Crumb, the undisputed godfather of underground comics, whose genre defining comic strips of the 60s and 70s ushered in a new age of self-expression in the medium and redefined comics as a countercultural art form.
Exhibiting Artists
Ana Benaroya, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Carroll Dunham, Chris Ofili and R. Crumb
