The Favorite, 2024, Oil on panel, 82 x 96 inches
Artists in the collection
Aubrey Levinthal
We as humans have an unhealthy predisposition to filling air to the brim with words, space with objects and running around until we’re out of breath. We may be so terrified of emptiness that we tremble when we are impatient or speak too much when we are nervous. It is the rare guru that can sit quietly for hours and celebrate pause. The paintings of Aubrey Levinthal inhabit these moments, the time in-between. Mouths are purposefully closed, the work is remarkably quiet..
Unique to this exhibition are three of Levinthal’s preparatory studies. These intimate works on paper, introduce Levinthal’s characters and motifs and share her process for creating her complex paintings.
Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA) received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia, PA and a BA from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. She is a three-time recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Recent exhibitions include Haverkampf Galerie, Berlin; M + B, Los Angeles, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London: Grimm, London, curated by Russell Tovey; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Monya Rowe Gallery, NY. Levinthal’s work was also included in the group exhibition “A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now” at The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston in 2022. The artist lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.
Hotel Pool, 2023, Oil on panel, 60 x 48 inches
Celeste Rapone
The Favorite debuted in Rapone’s 2024 exhibition Big Chess at Corbett vs. Dempsey. The following text is excerpted from the press release.
“In her most recent group of paintings, Celeste Rapone addresses a certain feeling of embarrassment around the public expression of ambition, especially for women. Something like the hollow conceit of public competitiveness…. (In) "spectacles" – her large-scale works… she creates images of women over-performing, reaching extravagantly for the golden ring, with ambivalent or awkward results. Rather than lampoon these figures, they are approached with a kind of oblique empathy, hoisted by their own petards. These works are composed as stage-like tableaus, with women playing oversized chess in the park, hiking up a public trail, spotlit on a proscenium, or shark fishing from a canoe.
As always, Rapone's compositions are spatially complex and require time to unpack – details (often hilarious references to popular or mass cultural objects and their attendant packaging) jostle with general forms (bodies, landscape, architecture) in ways that surprise and delight the careful viewer. Rapone paints alla prima, applying her materials directly, with no preparatory sketches, so the metaphor of over-preparedness that permeates these scenes is, for her, in an inverse relationship to her method of image-making, which is highly improvisatory and intuitive, starting with very basic color or shape ideas and building from that.”
(text credit : Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery)
Celeste Rapone (b. 1985, New Jersey) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Her work has been included in recent institutional exhibitions at Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; M Woods, Beijing, China; the START Museum, Shanghai, China; the Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China. R. Rapone is a 2018 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Rapone is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Josh Lilley Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery; she lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Ellen Berkenblit
Ellen Berkenblit’s extensive body of work employs the simplified language of cartooning to be our guide through the complexity of painting. Berkenblit’s lexicon of characters includes a recurring female whose Pinocchio-esque nose is often truncated at the canvas’s edge. She deceptively leads you to the possibility of a continuation on another panel. As viewers we have been duped; the characters that lure us into Berkenblit’s paintings are not there for a laugh, but the vehicle for a story about the depths of painting itself. In particular she challenges our expectations of the comic form by filling her characters with something that notoriously make us all uncomfortable: abstract painting. Berkenblit’s mastery of black paint (varying its hues and textures), allows her to explore the tension between its absence and presence. The magic continues in her search for light to bring us out of the darkness, both thematically and in paint.
The exhibition features three of Berkenblit’s recent paintings: Flower Circus, 2022; Light Bulb Lane, 2022; and Fireman’s Carnival, 2019, shown alongside a series of recent gouache drawings.
Born in Paterson, NJ, Berkenblit went on to receive her BFA from Cooper Union in 1980. Her work can be found in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Cincinnati Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She is also the recipient a 2014 Guggenheim fellowship. Ellen Berkenblit is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Vielmetter in Los Angeles and Corbett & Dempsey in Chicago.
Judith Linhares
Two of Linhares’s recent paintings welcome visitors upon entry to The Mill.
“I use a lotta yellow paint. It’s a transitory moment sunset and sundown, and I think I am always thinking about THE LIGHT.”- Judith Linhares (video interview PPOW)
Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) composes folkloric, figurative paintings from confident, abstract brushwork, utilizing broad strokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Harnessing portentous yet quotidian symbols, her uniquely irradiant paintings celebrate the female body and communal experience. Fueled by the permissive, psychedelic atmosphere of the 1960s, Linhares continues to investigate the relationship between the conscious and unconscious – her dreams often providing her work with their mythic narratives, characters, and kaleidoscopic compositions that pulsate with color.
Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA, among others. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, an exhibition featuring five decades of work, was presented at the Sarasota Art Museum, FL, in winter 2022. The exhibition included a curated presentation of works by Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath, highlighting the longstanding influence of dialogue between artists. Linhares presented Honey in the Rock, her first solo exhibition at Massimo de Carlo, London, UK, in spring 2023. In November 2023, Linhares presented a collection of rarely seen works from the 1970s in Love Letters from San Jose, her first exhibition at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. P·P·O·W presented Linhares's third solo exhibition with the gallery in spring 2025.
(text credit : PPOW gallery)
Vera Iliatova
Hinting at historical paintings, Vera Iliatova’s compositions are figurative in an archetypal way. In contrast to stylistically similar paintings of the 19th century, Iliatova’s females are posed not for the benefit of the male gaze but for their own self awareness. Recurring in her work is a paused theatrical moment with a cast of female characters portrayed together in an ephemeral, classical space: a garden, a solarium, a forest. Their eyes set somewhere far outside the boundaries of the work and they appear seemingly lost in thought. Each individual figure feels entirely alone and separate, and yet they are together in their solitude.
The exhibition features two of Iliatova’s paintings: Bon-A-Tirer, 2022 and Untitled, 2018. Untitled is accompanied by a series of drawings and prints that explore different outcomes of this same composition.
Vera Iliatova grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She received her BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2004) and a residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program (2007/2008). In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Vera lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and currently is a professor at Sarah Lawerence College and New York Art Academy. Vera Iliatova is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York City.
