Young Americans
Exhibition at Donopoulos IFA, Thessaloniki
Opening 17 December, 2021, 19:00
Michelle Jezierski, Joseph Kameen, Adrienne Elyse Meyers
Curated by Jurriaan Benschop
This exhibition presents the paintings of three American artists who focus on space in their
work. The interiors, landscapes, and other constellations they create are not just physical
spaces, but also spaces of the mind that evoke memories and suspense, triggering perception
and the imagination.
Geometric and organic shapes come together in the work of Michelle Jezierski. To find a
compositional structure, she shifts and breaks observed spaces into vertical, horizontal, or
diagonal bands, rearranging them to introduce an abstract rhythm into the image. Multiple
simultaneous spaces are woven together in one painting. For the viewer, this causes fore- and
background to oscillate. “Through the use of reflections, repetitions, and geometric
disturbances, I augment the different visual planes,” the artist notes. Coming from a family of
musicians, Jezierski likes to approach painting through aspects such as rhythm, harmony, or
dissonance. She studied with Tony Cragg at the University of the Arts in Berlin and with Amy
Sillman at Cooper Union in New York. She is a Berlin-born American and lives and works in the
German capital.
In the domestic interiors of Joseph Kameen, the everyday order of things seems disrupted.
Objects have special powers, making us witness moments of alienation or wonder. A play of
light and shadow leads the attention through the rooms. “The subjects of my paintings, both
figures and objects, are in the process of coming to terms with their surroundings,” the artist
explains. “They are immersed in light and space, but do not acknowledge it. Distance,
emptiness, and temporality are common themes, but always paired with lightness, freedom, or
humor.” Kameen received his MFA at Indiana University in Bloomington where he studied with
Tim Kennedy and Eve Mansdorf. Currently he lives in Aiken, South Carolina, where he teaches
painting at the University of South Carolina Aiken.
In the works of Adrienne Elyse Meyers, empty interiors or fragments of rooms give
opportunities for speculation about things that might have happened next door, or that are
about to occur. The action itself is not depicted; it is just the stage that we see in the paintings.
A reduction in figuration and palette leads to increased imagination. “I play into the image’s
uncertainties,” the artist remarks. “What is in the next room, outside the window, or filling a
silhouette is undisclosed (…) There is something close to the melancholic here, pulling into a
longing for what might be hiding in the image, what secrets or potential histories it may hold.”
Meyers earned an MFA at the University of Chicago, where she studied with Jessica Stockholder
and Laura Letinski. She lives and works in Chicago.
The exhibition is curated by Berlin-based writer and curator Jurriaan Benschop. He is a writer
for Artforum International and the author of the essay book Salt in the Wound: Encountering
Contemporary Artists across Europe (Helsinki, 2019). Exhibitions that he has curated include Re:
Imagining Europe (Berlin, 2017) and Taking Root (Düsseldorf, 2019-20), as well as A Grammar
of Gestures (2021-22), an exhibition of paintings currently on view in Athens.