Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Baseball on the Radio, an exhibition of new works by Brooklyn-based artist Eamon Monaghan. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery and will be on view from February 11 - March 11, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6-8pm. Building a world, like listening to a ballgame on the radio or writing a description of food, is a collaborative, trust-based endeavor, necessarily incomplete. In Baseball on the Radio, Eamon Monaghan offers sculptural reliefs activated by richly painted surfaces and carefully staked outer edges. The works are self-contained, with diegetic light sources, reflections, and weather patterns originating and resolving discretely within each object. They are not closed circuits, though: meaning springs from the artist’s connected metafictions, and expanded truths are gleaned piecemeal. Monaghan’s reliefs provide the viewer with much information, but, like radio, not everything. People are scarce, for example. A gentleman floats alone on a road-bounded lake in Fishing at Night, an unseen motorist zips through the downpour in Rainy Sunset, and that’s it. We’re made to wonder at the absurdist groundskeeper who clipped out the limbs in Topiary Garden, the legions typing away in Skyscraper, and what the voice crackling out of the radio in Table thinks about that catch in shallow left field. Like the completely built sculptural sets that furnish the artist’s ongoing video practice, specificities of scale prove deliberately fungible, and the viewer becomes a potential–maybe necessary–participant in the work. We are encouraged to shrink our bodies and sit under the wilted streetlamp in Park Bench. These considerations of scale and form are bound up with Monaghan’s use of material. Made of painted epoxy clay over cardboard, tinfoil, and wire armatures on wood supports, the works’ stippled surfaces and condensed frontal perspectives give consistent texture and shape to Monaghan’s categorically elusive vignettes. Applying painterly strategies to sculptural forms, Monaghan’s objects remain distinct from, and exemplary of, both traditions. It’s here that notions of trust and truth return, as Monaghan’s perspectival maneuvering and egalitarian renderings of water, steel, brick, wood, and grass feel more generous than illusory. Indeed, we might recall our own experiences with scenes, buildings, and benches just like these–and the limited vantage afforded to us in those unremarkable encounters. But the artist’s promise is one of expansion; in firmly setting the terms of our access to his world, Monaghan expands our capacity for seeing our own. __ Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Recent Paintings and Drawings, an exhibition by New York-based artist Robert Feintuch. This exhibition is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery and will be installed in our Viewing Room from February 11 – March 11, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6-8pm. As one hand points, another strikes, and a third offers flimsy assistance amid disaster. Across Robert Feintuch’s recent paintings and drawings, the gestures of- and objects in- the hand become subjects, selves, and surrogates. Through learned and assumed symbolisms–pointing a finger up suggests a bestowal of wisdom, a la the toga-clad philosopher, while a gripped club portends cartoonish threat, a la The Flintstones–Feintuch uses humor and self-deprecation to prod at painting’s lofty aspirations. Are these the hands of some unseen, would-be hero, like a Hercules, a He-Man, or a god? Or are they self-contained and finite–attributes absent the attributed? In Pontiff, the artist gives us a simplified shoulder and a graying head hunched in front of a lecturing hand but stops short of a face. Is the hand he genuflects in front of in a painting or out the window? Resisting narrative, Feintuch’s works elevate ambiguity and anonymity, positioning the latter as a site of historical and formal freedom. Long Fire implies danger without identifying it, promising a fire bucket, but not necessarily water; Long Pontiff parodies authority while seeming to offer the trappings of a eureka moment left unspoken. For Feintuch, these considerations extend to materials and processes: he achieves a classicizing, fresco-like luminosity by layering thin polymer emulsion on prepared aluminum-faced honeycomb panels. Delicately feathered and lightly applied, his surfaces sit on solid, sculptural substrates. Echoes of Renaissance and Gothic figurative traditions confront the material legacies of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, fastening ethereality to industry. It's this very alloy–history, gesture, material, form–that propels Feintuch’s work toward a deflation of grandiosity altogether, an understanding of artmaking (and life) as defined by missed cues and fuckups. Seductive surfaces and sleek panels deliver scrawny arms and bad posture. For all they might offer by way of convenience, our present codes and symbols often prove facile and flaccid. And surely the past wasn’t much different: even Hercules, often depicted standing naked, was exposed.