Plum Cloutman + Nina Silverberg

Exhibition Dates: March 14 - April 20, 2024

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 14th @ 6PM-8PM

39 White Street, Tribeca

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1969 Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring recent paintings by the London-based artists Plum Cloutman and Nina Silverberg. Both artists create poetic, intimately scaled works that suggest memory and dreams.

Plum Cloutman paints enigmatic scenes that combine personal memory, fantasy, history, and myth. By building her paintings in meticulous layers of oil paint, water-color pencil, and pastel, she achieves exquisite textures of woodgrain, burnished clay, and weathered surfaces etched with the patina of time. Meanwhile, her warm greens and pinks are reminiscent of the dreamy, wistful palettes of Rococo and Romanticist masters. Psychologically rich and subtly surreal, Cloutman’s paintings allow viewers to bring our own interpretations to the work, completing her ambiguous narratives with personal associations.

Nina Silverberg’s paintings of everyday objects and architectural elements are imbued with the deep structures of geometric abstraction. Her empty gloves, occluded piazza archways, and blank-paged books recall the visual puzzles of de Chirico and Magritte, as well as the classicism of her native Rome. Playing with foreground-back- ground reversals, optical illusions, and games of concealment, their pared-down formal structures belie their philosophical complexity. Like Cloutman, Silverberg employs a muted palette of dusky pinks, mauves, and earth tones that evoke a half-remembered past.

Plum Cloutman (b. 1995) is a painter and printmaker whose work has been awarded the Catriona White Prize, the Lyon and Turnbull Prize, and was featured in the 2019 Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition. Taking the still, the ornamental and the static as raw artistic material, she uses her brush, pencil and pastel – in small, deft concentric motions – to animate her subjects. Sharp and deliberate lines differentiate the pools of soft colour characteristics of the scenes she paints: a bricolage of textures, tones and moods that re- call the hazy and unreliable dreamscapes of sleep. These images are often fractured between panels, or affixed to the more corporeal textures of steel or metal. Graduating in 2018 from Edinburgh College of Art, Cloutman has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, with recent shows in New York, Athens, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Amsterdam.

Nina Silverberg (b. 1994, Rome, Italy) is a painter who explores themes of isolation, illness and the relation- ship of the inside/outside. She received a BA from the City and Guilds of London Art School, and now lives and works in London. She has presented solo exhibitions at Creekside Gallery, London, UK and Studio Barnum, Palazzo Nicolaci, Noto, Italy, and has additionally been featured in group shows such as Viewing Room at Soup Gallery, London UK (2023); Portal, Arusha Gallery, London, UK (2023); Total Straw, Parkhouse Studios, London, UK (2023); Illuminations, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2023); Streams of Consciousness, Particle Collection x Philips, The Sagamore, Miami USA (2022); Noontime Ghosts, Eve Liebe Gallery, London UK (2022); New Romantics, The Artist Room Gallery x Phillips, Eugean Lee Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Cool, Fresh, Sweet Waters, The Tub, Hackney, London UK (2022); Rebuilding Beirut with Pride, The auction Collective, On- line (2021); Framed, Kobi and Teal, Somerset UK (2021); Pending, San Mei Gallery, London, UK (2020); and We Can Only Have Fun On Certain Days, Warbling Collective, London, UK (2019). Her work has been published in Elephant Magazine, Nothing Personal, and Artmaze Magazine.

For Inquires, please contact:
Logan Beitmen | e:  logan@1969gallery.com

About 1969 Gallery

Founded in September 2016, 1969 is a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. Through solo / group / external exhibitions and art fair presentations, the Gallery has cultivated the careers of its represented artists and a broader community of artists primarily devoted to painting.

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