Quotidian/Episodes: Eric Legris + Sara Rahmanian

Curated by Yoab Vera

Exhibition Dates: January 13 – February 13, 2022

1969 Gallery presents Quotidian/Episodes: Eric Legris + Sara Rahmanian, a two-person exhibition consisting of paintings that explore personal remembrances of events anchored in times of contemplation. The title alludes to the psychology of the everyday within episodic memories — the conscious act to discern the emotional, temporal and spatial qualities of a past experience.

In Sara Rahmanian's paintings the self-reflexive gaze functions as a performative act. Noting the quotidian in solitude, Rahmanian observes objects on the brink of transition. Each painting builds up uncanny vistas of interior spaces where the banal morphs into a magically realistic nuance. Fragments of place and snippets of humor emerge on re-imagined playful scenes .

Using visual maneuvers of defamiliarization, Rahmanian disrupts her own mnemonic diaries. Each painting encompasses a syncretism of memories — yesteryears in Teheran are in dialogue with a recent emigration to the American Northeast. Throughout her paintings, Sara Rahmanian continues to explore expanding possibilities of meaning-making. This potency is inherent in the simple act of pausing to observe the everydayness of material things.

Eric Legris’ work explores ways to access sensorial insight through reinterpreting and repainting his own paintings and hand-woven tapestries. Like images of the mind, Legris paintings are dynamic as they variate from one surface to the next, whether in dimension, material, and texture. Each painting becomes a redolent transformation that is actually a re-creation of previous processes.

Legris pieces together points of time in every instant that he revisits an event. Evocative of pentimento, to paint over the texture of layered paint, Legris delves into old memories according to his current somatic tempo: an immediate plethora of thoughts, emotions and sensations coalesce. Every painting reminds of an event and at the same time an accumulation of distortions, deletions and additions caused by cyclical recollections of the everyday.

Artists:

Eric Legris (b. 1981, Lubec, Maine) received an MFA in Painting from Bard College in 2011. He has shown internationally in museums and galleries including the Portland Museum of Art, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Berlin, Shoot the Lobster Gallery, NYC, and La Mama Gallery, NYC. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sara Rahmanian (b. 1993, Tehran, Iran) received an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2021. Her work has been shown internationally in Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai, Delgosha Gallery and in Tehran. In 2019 Rahmanian created a public mural in collaboration with Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian at Reem Central Skate Park in Abu Dhabi. She lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

Curator:

Yoab Vera (b. 1985, Mexico City) received an MFA in Painting from UCLA in 2021, where he also studied at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He received a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from Hunter College and studied Architecture at UNAM, Mexico. He lives and works between New York and Mexico City.

For further information or to request images, members of the media may contact Amanda Barker | e: amanda@1969gallery.com | t: +1 (212) 777-2172

About 1969 Gallery

Founded in September 2016, 1969 is a contemporary art gallery, with two gallery spaces in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Tribeca neighborhoods. Through solo / group / external exhibitions and art fair presentations, the Gallery has cultivated the careers of its six represented artists and a broader community of artists primarily devoted to painting. Our independently curated exhibitions also expand our audience by exhibiting all different forms of art from artists worldwide.

During the past five-and-a-half years, we have organized over fifty exhibitions, including four curated online exhibitions, and participated in seven art fairs and published four books and catalogs and co-published one ‘zine. (Our 2022 goal is to publish more critical writing about artists and exhibitions at 1969). Our gallery roster ncludes members of the LGBTQ and BIPOC communities, including two Latinx artists and one gender non-binary artist.

A highlight of our recent accomplishments include: a two-gallery exhibition in partnership with Albertz Benda of paintings and works on paper by Cristina BanBan; our residency program at our original LES gallery space; and placement of our artists’ works into museum and institutional collections including ICA Miami, The High Museum (Atlanta, GA), Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) and The Columbus Museum of Contemporary Art (Ohio).

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