Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York, is pleased to announce Platform 2021 Online, a follow up digital exhibition featuring the work of six current and recent MFA students from programs throughout New York City. This show continues the conversation with several of the artists featured in our Platform exhibition from the summer of 2020. Works by Katie Croft, María Dusamp, Renée Estée, Madhini Nirmal, So Ye Oh, Lauryn Welch, and Lizzie Zelter will be online from Monday April 22nd – Saturday, May 24th.
Working in a variety of media including works on paper, painting, ceramic, and fabric works, these artists have been selected from Hunter College, Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and Columbia University. Their work touches on a wide array of themes such as intimacy, identity, gender, and power.
Katie Croft is a Brooklyn based artist who combines practices of ceramics, painting, and drawing. She uses clay as a canvas for her drawings and paintings, creating dimensional figures that are both revealing and closed off. Her ceramics address myths of identity, motherhood, medicine, and the body. Croft’s work repositions historical narratives dismissing female bodies and perspectives, and instead celebrates their power. Croft is an MFA candidate of Painting and Drawing at Pratt University. She received her BFA from Baylor University in 2005.
María Dusamp (formerly Durán Sampedro) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work examines the effects of physical violence and the impacts it has on a survivor’s memory and perspective. Through her examination of the mental pain caused by bodily trauma, Dusamp seeks to steer the focus toward the strength and resilience of survivors. Her work provides a compassionate response to the oftentimes-triggering conversations surrounding violence and abuse. Duran earned an MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in 2020 and a BFA with Distinction and Honors in Communication Design at the Pratt Institute in 2017.
Renée Estée is a New York based painter originally from Melbourne, Australia. Her large-scale narrative paintings are often influenced by literature and poetry. In the painting, The Send Off, she references the poem “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field” by Mary Oliver, exploring the themes of death, life, and renewal. Estée is a current Hunter College MFA candidate (projected graduation 2022) with a focus on painting and recipient of the Hunter College Summer Scholarship and Stanton Grant. Renée graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, with her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) in 2015 and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors), in 2016, graduating with First Class Honors.
Madhini Nirmal is an artist based in Seattle from Chennai, South India. Her paintings and monotypes depict scenes populated with anthropomorphic animals that explore mankind’s concepts of power, caste, class, and ecology. Through her use of dynamic compositions and vivid color palettes, Nirmal addresses human systems run by power and privilege with an eye that is both playful and incisive. Nirmal received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a Bachelor of Visual Arts: Painting from Stella Maris College in Chennai India.
So Ye Oh is a New York based artist who works with fabric and textiles. Through hand-painted fabrics and soft sculptures, she examines notions of comfort and security, recalling memories of childhood through objects such as blankets, cushions, and plush figures. She specifically looks at childhood through the complex relationship between mother and child as well as the yearning for stability when facing adulthood in a constantly changing world. She received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Pratt Institute in 2020 and a BA in Art & Design, BA in Psychology, Minor in Japanese (Asian Language and Culture) from the University of Michigan in 2016.
Lauryn Welch is a New York City based artist and a longtime resident of the Monadnock Region in New Hampshire. Her paintings depict both figurative and landscape subject matter, focusing heavily on naturally recurring patterns. She explores the ways in which colors and motifs found on the body can interact with one’s surrounding environment. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and received her BFA at SUNY Purchase College in 2015.
Lizzie Zelter portrays interior space and domestic objects in disorientating ways. Interested in questions of rootedness and displacement, she aims to decontextualize the familiar. Her paintings morph scale and perspective, disguise everyday forms, and play with reflections and light sources. Lizzie is currently a first-year MFA Painting candidate at Columbia University.
