November 19 – December 23, 2021

Winter Exhibition

Kira Nam Greene, Jonathan Hammer, Dion Johnson, Kurt Lightner, Kelly McCormick, Melissa Meyer, Bruce Robinson, Laura Sanders, and Almond Zigmund

November 19 – December 23, 2021

Winter Exhibition

Kira Nam Greene, Jonathan Hammer, Dion Johnson, Kurt Lightner, Kelly McCormick, Melissa Meyer, Bruce Robinson, Laura Sanders, and Almond Zigmund

Melissa Meyer Summer in the City I, 2018, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 in.

Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to present Winter Exhibition, a group exhibition of works by Kira Nam Greene, Jonathan Hammer, Dion Johnson, Kurt Lightner, Kelly McCormick, Melissa Meyer, Bruce Robinson, Laura Sanders, and Almond Zigmund.

In the exhibition

Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to present Winter Exhibition, a group exhibition of new works surveying painting to sculpture from a few of our favorite artists including: Kira Nam Greene, Jonathan Hammer, Dion Johnson, Kurt Lightner, Kelly McCormick, Melissa Meyer, Bruce Robinson, Laura Sanders, Lynton Wells and Almond Zigmund. The show is on view November 19 – December 23, 2021, with gallery hours Tuesdays thru Thursdays 11-6, and by appointment and virtual appointment. For more information, please email us at [email protected].

Jonathan Hammer

Jonathan Hammer is as known for his revisionist Dada theories as he is for his brilliant, epic creations heavy with symbolism. Using a vocabulary of clowns, old toys and antiquated landscapes, Hammer’s work embodies the duality of themes including victim and victimizer, power and powerlessness, innocence and malevolence.

Originally from Chicago, Hammer lived in California after receiving a degree in bookbinding from the London College of Bookbinding. His work has been shown in galleries and museums in New York, California and throughout Europe and is in major private and public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Museum of Art and New York Public Library. In 2002, Hammer published a new, illustrated translation of Hugo Ball’s visionary novella Tenderenda the Fantast along with his own critical writing on Dadaism in Ball and Hammer (Yale University Press). Hammer currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

Dion Johnson

Dion Johnson is based in Los Angeles, California. Born in 1975 in Bellaire, OH, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art, received his BFA from The Ohio State University and MFA from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. He is represented by Western Project, Los Angeles, and Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Johnson’s work has been reviewed and featured in articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ART News, Art Forum and others. His work is in public collections such as The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, The Capital Group Companies, Los Angeles, CA, Creative Artists Agency, CA, Pizutti Collection Columbus, OH, Progressive Corporation and many more.

Johnson uses color to evoke the contemporary urban, digital and natural landscape of Southern California, and skews the vocabulary of abstraction into a hybrid techno-language. His work is a clear balance of the harmonic and dissonant qualities in our environment. David Pagel wrote in a catalog essay “…“These seemingly calm arrangements of gently curved shapes, in a sumptuously saturated and wildly unnatural palette, are anything but wallflowers. They play with scale like nobody’s business, filling the empty space around them with inclusive, user-friendly snippets of imagined symphonies… A handful of Johnson’s eccentric configurations include brightly colored lines that define shapes that seem to await being filled in, as if they were the long lost relatives of a kid’s coloring book… Time does not stand still in these paintings so much as they suspend you in long drawn-out moments of acutely satisfying attentiveness.”

Kurt Lightner

Ohio native Kurt Lightner currently lives and works in New York. He received his BA from Columbus College of Art and Design, and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. Lightner’s paintings and sculptures have been included in exhibitions at PS1 MOMA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Queens Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, and are in numerous private and public collections. He has been a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and The Headlands Center for the Arts Project Studio Residency in San Francisco.

Kelly McCormick

Born and raised in Michigan, Kelly McCormick received his BFA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is currently living in Cold Spring, NY.

Melissa Meyer

Melissa Meyer received both a BS and an MA from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes solo exhibitions at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York and Galerie Renee Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland.

Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions – one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her works have been included recently in group exhibitions at The Jewish Museum, New York; Texas Gallery, Houston; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York and the National Academy of Design in New York, an organization of which she is a member.

She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Bishkek US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan. Her work is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum and many other public and private collections across the United States. Meyer was awarded a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. She is a frequent artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.

Kira Nam Greene

Born in Seoul, Korea, Kira Nam Greene lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, her MFA from School of Visual Arts and her BA in International Relations from Seoul National University. Prior to becoming an artist, Greene earned her Ph. D in Political Science from Stanford University, specializing in Political Economy in East Asia, and taught wide variety of subject matters in Political Economy both in academic and business settings.

Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as Sheldon Museum of Art, Muskegon Museum of Art, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum, Accola Griefen Gallery, Lodge Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery, Lyons Wier Gallery and Jane Lombard Gallery. Her work has been covered in publications such as Artnet News, Art F City, Wallpaper, W Magazine, Lincoln Star Journal, Art21 Blog, Hyphen Magazine, The Korea Dailyand New York Art Beat. In 2019, Greene was a finalist for the inaugural Bennett Prize. Greene was a Stewart MacMillan Chair in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2017-18 and is currently a part-time faculty at the Fine Arts MFA Program at Parsons School of Design.

Bruce Robinson

Bruce Robinson received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Indiana University. He is a Professor Emeritus at the Columbus College of Art and Design and his work has appeared in numerous regional and national juried shows. Robinson is the recipient of an award for individual excellence from the Ohio Arts Council and he has been a juror for several local shows.

Laura Sanders

Laura Sanders is a figurative painter whose work explores women in landscape with an interest in the emotional, painterly and political aspects of the mise en scène. Her paintings of people in the woods or in the ocean capture the realistic sense of the figure and the environment, while maintaining a high level of painterly qualities. Sanders received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio in 1988. She has exhibited her works at galleries and museums across the US. She has received several grants and awards including the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and most recently artist residency at the Headlands for the Arts, Sausalito, California.

Lynton Wells

Born in Baltimore, MD, 1940 Lynton Wells received a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad with over 150 group and solo shows since 1970, and has work in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. The artist currently resides in New York City.

Almond Zigmund

The sculpture of Almond Zigmund is bold, geometric and modernist. Zigmund strives to blend the intellect with a bright palette and bold designs, as her philosophy is that art should energize, not just work on a conceptual level.

Originally from Brooklyn, Zigmund received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, and studied both in New York and Paris, France. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she studied art theory and criticism with Dave Hickey. This formative time, outside the New York art world, with the maverick, Macarthur award winning critic Hickey, encouraged her to push her boundaries, follow her own path and make smart, cool stuff.

Zigmund’s work has been exhibited internationally with shows in New York, Los Angeles, Zurich, Las Vegas and Columbus. Her work has been selected for shows by leading and emerging curators including: Dave Hickey, Robert Storr, David Pagel, Heather Harmon, Jessica Frost, Aaron Baker, Steven Criqui, among others.