As She Left It
from Gloria Kisch’s Studio
Photographs by Andrea Stern and Drawings by Jane Gifford
April 28 – June 4, 2022
Opening Reception April 28, 5-7pm
dieFirma, Cooper Square, NYC
dieFirma is pleased to announce As She Left It: from Gloria Kisch’s Studio, featuring photographs by Andrea Stern and drawings by Jane Gifford. This exhibition will coincide with Kisch’s solo exhibition at Salon 94 Design. Located at 1 Freeman Alley, As Above, So Is Below showcases Kisch’s functional sculpture, totemic mobile/bells and floral wall works.
In 2016, Andrea Stern visited Three Ponds, Kisch’s final home and studio, after the artists’ untimely death, using her large format camera to memorialize the artists’ work and space left behind.
Stern’s photographs are so convincing that they seem to present us with portraits of things, as opposed to still-lives of things, as Kisch left them. Like the empty chair standing alone in the middle of her studio, these images hold many mysteries.
British painter Jane Gifford contributes watercolor drawings, each depicting a different work from Gloria’s oeuvre. Exploiting the unique texture and properties of handmade Khadi paper and Indian ink, Gifford’s drawings are depictions of the original sculptures, but also stand alone. Although Kisch rarely drew preparatory studies before creating her large metal works, Gifford found similarities in their methodology: exploring ideas through series, connection to the human, to the natural world and to humor.
Andrea Stern
Andrea Stern is a photographer and founder of dieFirma. Stern has applied her interest and education in the arts to a variety of business and cultural endeavors. From 1996 - 2000, she was the founding Creative Director and Publisher of the Long Island Voice, a niche-publication that was an offshoot of the legendary Village Voice. For over a decade following, she worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, working with publications that included The New York Times, T Magazine, The New Yorker, and Fortune Magazine. Her fine art photography exists as three distinct bodies of work- Inheritance (1990 - 2007), Assembly (2007 - 2013) and Dog Days (1989 - 1999)- each accompanied by a book; examples of these works may be found in public collections that include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others. In 2019, she and partner Ken DiPaola launched dieFirma, a hybrid art gallery and retail experience located on Cooper Square.
Jane Gifford
Jane Gifford is a London based British artist. She studied fine art at Newcastle University and printmaking at Central St Martins, London in the UK and travelled to New York to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School on a Max Beckmann scholarship. Gifford’s practice is centered on drawing, the immediacy of the drawn line, and the ephemeral quality of paper. Her work is largely focused on her dreams, which she records daily as subject matter for drawings, paintings, prints and video. Using dream journals as the starting point, her work references the diary as book, as memoir and as continuum. She draws every day, selecting pivotal images from the written records, which then form the basis for other works, often on paper, sometimes including text, usually in series, providing a kind of storyboard to her subconscious.