Vincent Baldassano (b. 1947) is an artist defined by his experimentation with imaginatively shaped and elaborately cut canvases. The forms and high-keyed colors derive from still life elements—fruits, vegetables, and flowers—but become warped and suggestive of bodies. Baldassano conjures a lush garden of surrealist organisms. Baldassano was a founding member of the Manhattan Breakfast Club during the early 1970s and ‘80s in Soho, where he lived at the time. His shaped canvases have a lively play between stylized geometry and the organic. 

A similar play informs the striking paintings of Naoto Nakagawa (b. 1944). In them, highly keyed depictions of nature are juxtaposed with consumer items like drills, hair combs, pencils, and bicycles. Not entirely a Pop artist nor a Photorealist, Nakagawa was interested in “man-made versus nature-made,” a human relationship with nature at times harmonious or violent. Between 1975 and 1979 the artist lived in Rural Vermont which sparked his interest in the raw elements of the natural world reminiscent of his childhood outside Osaka.

The figurative paintings in the exhibition explore themes of interiority and exteriority. Charles DuBack (1926–2015) uses a reductive painterly means to articulate figures, but then adds sculptural “real” elements to create environments both indoor and outdoor. Mimi Gross (b. 1940) is represented by a monumental drawing for the 3-D installation Ruckus Manhattan; both the drawing and installation explore the density of public life in Manhattan—in this case a subway car. Martha Edelheit’s (b. 1931) paintings of nude women and men often show figures seated or reclining but lacking visual articulation of the furniture their bodies would be resting on. Her work asks how much specificity the viewer needs to situate themselves. 

Regina Granne’s 1970s paintings of female nudes utilize extreme cropping, spatial compression, and an angled point of view to engage and even disorient the viewer, defamiliarizing our understanding of the subject. Granne (1939–2013) has described her work as "a game of the mind” but also one that “is intensely observed and matter-of-fact.” Both Granne’s and Edelheit’s painting can be situated within a larger context of women artists reclaiming the female gaze. The groundswell of feminist art gave rise to women-centered exhibition spaces in New York such as A.I.R., of which Granne was a member, and SOHO20, where Edelheit was a member.