LES FEMMES 

August 21 - September 6, 2021
71 Hill Street in Southampton, New York

Tethys Art is pleased to present Les Femmes, a group show curated by Indira Cesarine, opening on August 21st and on view through September 6th at 71 Hill Street in Southampton, New York. The 3rd and closing Summer exhibition presents the vision of several notable female artists including legendary artists Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, pioneering feminists Robin Tewes and Grace Graupe-Pillard, and social media sensation Leah Schrager, as well as emerging voices including Fahren Feingold, Alexandra Rubinstein and Loren Erdrich. Les Femmes explores the contemporary narrative of the female gaze, while addressing the representation of women in contemporary culture and art.

Today, the rights and freedom of women across the world are threatened. Through art, societal views are challenged and can be changed. Art can show a different view, provoke and instigate dialogue on even the most controversial topics. The artists in Les Femmes explore how culture and gender affect power, challenge dated social systems and biases, and explore larger notions of female constructs in contemporary society. They examine stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism, unmask female (in)appropriateness, arousal, celebrity and commercialism, and give a new voice to women. 

Featured artists include Alexandra Rubinstein, Alison Jackson,  Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Dana Schutz, Fahren Feingold, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Kat Toronto aka Miss Meatface, Katya Zvereva, Leah Schrager, Loren Erdrich, Michele Pred, Natasha Law, Robin Tewes, Sylvia Maier and Tara Lewis. 

About Tethys Art

Since its inception in 2021 by Nitin Gambhir and Elena Ulansky, Tethys Art’s core value is to make the collecting of art more accessible by navigating the art world for those who are approaching it for the first time to helping established collectors grow their collections, as well as discover emerging artists that stimulate and complement their existing collections. Tethys Art is more than just a physical gallery - it is an international platform to educate and introduce different perspectives. It aims to curate and exhibit quality art in a way that recontextualizes traditional constructs and generates meaningful dialogue. 

About Curator Indira Cesarine 

Indira Cesarine has become known for her empowering exhibitions. Since launching The Untitled Space gallery in 2015, Cesarine has curated over 40 exhibitions and has exhibited artwork by more than 450 artists. She has partnered with a number of charitable foundations including The Watermill Center Foundation, ERA Coalition, Women’s Fund For Equality, ARTWALK NY benefiting the Coalition for the Homeless, She Should Run, SaveArtSpace, and Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation among many others, raising funds for their causes via exhibitions, benefit art auctions, as well as a number of other fundraising initiatives. Her exhibitions have been featured internationally in many publications including American Vogue, Vogue Italia, Forbes, Newsweek, W Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, CNN, New York Magazine, Dazed and Confused, i-D Magazine, and The Huffington Post among many others. In 2019 Cesarine launched Art4Equality, a non-profit initiative supporting equality-themed art exhibitions and special projects including films and public art. Recent projects of Art4Equality include “Art4Equality x Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness” public art billboard series with SaveArtSpace which was presented along with a gallery group show of over 50 artists at The Untitled Space, September - November 2020. She is also currently acting as a curatorial advisor and director of strategy for Tethys Art, which launched in June 2021 in Southampton, NY.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS: 

Alexandra Rubinstein is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist whose practice focuses on how culture and gender affect power. She came to the United States from Russia when she was 9, and spent the magical years of puberty enduring the misogyny of both cultures. Through self-education, therapy, and experience, she worked to reconcile the burden of womanhood, and channel her rage and resentment into her work. In said work, she challenges dated social systems and prejudices, and reconstructs the cis heterosexual female experience by transforming women from passive objects to active consumers. Taking back power and control, without taking centuries of oppression too seriously. \

Alison Jackson is a contemporary, BAFTA award artist who explores the cult of celebrity – an extraordinary phenomenon created by the media,  publicity industries and the public figures themselves.  Her work sits squarely in the middle of the current fake news, alternative facts or news debates. Jackson makes convincingly realistic work about celebrities doing things in private using cleverly styled lookalikes. Likeness becomes real and fantasy touches on the believable. She creates scenarios we have all imagined but never seen before. Jackson’s work has been widely exhibited in museums, galleries and in public collections across the world, including Pompidou Centre, La Louvre, The Frances Foundation, Paris; Tate Modern, The Tate Britain, The Hayward Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, London; Liverpool Biennial; San Francisco MoMA; Musée de L’Elysee, Lausanne; International Center of Photography, New York, among many others. Jackson’s artwork has additionally been featured in The Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Artnet as well as countless magazines and newspapers globally.

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist known for her combination of type and image that conveys a direct feminist cultural critique. Her works examine stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism with text layered over mass-media images. Rendered with black-and-white, red accented, Futura Bold Oblique font, inspired by the Constructivist Alexander Rodechenko, Kruger's works offer up short phrases such as “Thinking of You,” “You are a captive audience,” and “I shop therefore I am.” Like multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, Kruger uses language to broadcast her ideas in a myriad of ways, including through prints, T-shirts, posters, photographs, electronic signs, and billboards. “I'm fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy,” she explained of her work. Born on January 26, 1945 in Newark, NJ, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and art director after studying at both Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design (where she studied under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel) in the 1960s. Her early career path directly influenced the style her art would eventually take. She currently lives and works between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York. Her work has been the subject of countless major international exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997) traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1997–2000); the Serpentine Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2003), and the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2006), traveling to Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2006–07).

Dana Schutz’s work has been described as 'teetering on the edge of tradition and innovation’. ’My paintings are loosely based on metanarratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive. Recently I have been making paintings of sculptural goddesses, transitory still lifes, people who make things, people who are made and people who have the ability to eat themselves. Although the paintings themselves are not specifically narrative, I often invent imaginative systems and situations to generate information. These situations usually delineate a site where making is a necessity, audiences potentially don’t exist, objects transcend their function and reality is malleable .’ Dana Schutz 2004

Fahren Feingold imparts an ethereal quality to her unique works depicting the female form. Her watercolors featuring bold feminine nudes reference imagery from early 20th century French erotica, vintage American magazines from the 70s and 80s, and today’s Internet girls. The Los Angeles native moved to New York at the age of seventeen to study at the Parsons School of Design. After earning her BFA between Parsons and Glasgow School of Art, she worked as a fashion designer for top brands including Ralph Lauren, Nicole Miller and J.Crew, among others. In 2016, her dreamy watercolors caught the eye of the legendary Nick Knight, who commissioned her to illustrate Paris Fashion Week for SHOWStudio. Her work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions including “Moving Kate,” curated by Nick Knight for SHOWStudio in London and The Mass in Tokyo; “The Vulgar” at The Barbican in London, curated by Judith Clark and Adam Phillips; “Red Hot Wicked” at Studio C Gallery in Los Angeles; as well as a number of exhibitions at The Untitled Space, including her debut solo show in 2017.

Grace Graupe-Pillard has exhibited her artwork throughout the USA with one-person exhibitions in Hartford, CT., Jackson MS., Chicago Ill., Newark, NJ, in addition in NYC at The Proposition, Bernice Steinbaum, Donahue/Sosinski and Hal Bromm as well as The Frist Center in Nashville, TN, The NJ State Museum and the NJ Center for Visual Arts. In 2015 and 2006, she had solo exhibits at Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago; other solo exhibitions were at Payne Gallery at Moravian College, PA., Aljira Gallery, Newark, NJ., and Rider University, NJ. Graupe Pillard has exhibited her work in group exhibitions at P.S.1,  P.S. 122, The Drawing Center, and Cheim/Read Gallery among others and as has been the recipient of many grants including four from The NJ State Council on the Arts, as well as from The National Endowment for the Arts. She has received Public Art commissions from Shearson Lehman /American Express, AT&T, KPMG, Wonder Woman Wall at The Port Authority Bus Terminal, Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, New Brunswick, NJ. Commissions from NJ Transit for the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System at Garfield Station in Jersey City, and 2nd Street Station in Hoboken, and Aberdeen-Matawan Station in Aberdeen, NJ. Her work has been written about in The Village Voice, The NY Times, Art News, The Star-Ledger, Newsday, Flash Art, Artforum, Art in America, Arts, and Tema Celeste. 

Kat Toronto, AKA “Miss Meatface”, is a multidisciplinary artist hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area who works in performance-based photography. She uses her often unsettling and surreal images to explore cultural ideals of feminine beauty and the objectification of women in a feminist society by toying with the push and pull of dominance and submission, as well as the acts of revealing and concealing. Diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer in 2010 that eventually led to a full hysterectomy in 2013, Kat uses the name “Miss Meatface” as an artistic and spiritual catalyst to delve into a complex set of questions about where she now fits into society as a woman. Kat executes her work between London, England and San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the US and abroad, and was featured in a number of notable benefits including “Tabula Rasa” The Watermill Center’s Foundation’s 2019 exhibition and auction, as well as at New York Academy of Art’s “Take Home A Nude” at Sotheby’s. 

Katya Zvereva was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1990. She received her Master’s Degree of Architecture from the V. Surikov Moscow State Academy Art Institute in 2013, and her Masters of Fine Art from New York Academy of Art in 2016. A multidisciplinary artist, Zvereva’s work crosses over into many mediums, from painting, printmaking, drawing, and sculpture, to explorations with object d’art and furniture. In printmaking, she has developed her own unique technique based on monotypes mixed with drawing, which she often prints on multiple layers of fabric or hand-made paper. She creates large-scale installations based on analog woodcuts, which are printed by hand on a multitude of surfaces.  Her bold floral paintings, painted on canvas as well as leather, evoke emotional metaphors of the subconscious. Her artwork has been exhibited in New York City, Los Angles, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and can be found in many private art collections in the United States, France, Germany, and Russia.

Leah Schrager is an artist who works between the web and New York City. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School. In her work, she photographs, appears in, augments and markets her own image. She is interested in the line, movement and biography of the female body. In 2010, she founded a new form of therapy as Sarah White, The Naked Therapist, followed by online performance @OnaArtist (Instagram 3 million+).  Her project, “Ona,” an artist and musician, evolved out of the question of celebrity as art practice. With her performances, Schrager explores themes of sexuality, representation, and distribution. Her practice is situated in a contemporary hotbed of female (in)appropriateness, arousal, celebrity, fandom, and commercialism that seeks to explore female biography and labor in today’s global society.

Loren Erdrich received an MFA from the Burren College of Art at the National University of Ireland, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded residencies at the Jentel Foundation, Burren College of Art, Santa Fe Art Institute, thrice at Art Farm Nebraska, Sculpture Space and the Vermont Studio Center. Notable accomplishments include publication in ARTMAZE Mag’s Autumn Issue 14, and exhibitions with Proto Gomez and Field Projects in New York, Wasserman Projects in Detroit and The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington. Erdrich frequently collaborates with the poet Sierra Nelson, coauthoring the award winning I Take Back the Sponge Cake (published by Rose Metal Press) and Isolation (forthcoming in 2020). Erdrich lives and works in New York.

Michele Pred is a Swedish American conceptual artist whose practice includes sculpture, assemblage, and performance. Her work uncovers the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects, with a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security. Pred’s projects also contain social components that drive the conversation into public spaces. Examples include her exploration of the intersection of personal space and security by using airport-confiscated items after 9/11, the cultural background of the fight for reproductive rights, using thousands of expired birth control pills, and the continuing economic and political struggle for women’s rights, represented by her modified vintage handbag editions.  

Natasha Law’s vibrant blocks of gloss paint and descriptive lines characterise her svelte female figures. Often in an act of discarding clothing, her works beguilingly capture ephemeral moments of both vulnerability and intimacy. Tousled hair, the curve of a hip, or discarding clothing, the works allude to the privacy of domestic spaces and relies on the viewer’s own voyeuristic fascination to draw them into her intriguing vignettes. Her 2016 series Lines and Curves was realised through a range of media including paintings on aluminium, board, paper and collage. The range of surfaces act as an important instrument for her exploration of shapes, texture and line through her application of household gloss paint which creates the lustrous surface which has become part of her unique style. It is her protracted process which creates the vibrancy in her works. She often begins with line drawings from her modelling sessions and determines where to zoom in and crop the image before transcribing the lines onto the surface.

Robin Tewes was born in Queens New York in 1950. She received her BFA from Hunter College in 1978 and her MST from Pace University in 2012. She is the Recipient of many notable and prestigious awards, including the 2008 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Painting Award, the 2007 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Award, and the 2004 and 1989 New York Foundation for the Arts-Painting. Selected solo exhibitions include Wright Gallery, Adam Baumgold Gallery, Headbones Gallery, Klapper Hall Gallery, Bill Maynes Gallery, John Weber Gallery. Some group exhibitions include: at P.S. 1, P.S. 122 Painting Association, The Drawing Center, Aldridge Museum, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Hunterdon Museum. Tewes is interested in how much a single narrative moment can tell us about ourselves. Became a founding member of P.S122 Painting Association and now on the Board of Directors. She has been included recently in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Her work has been recognized and written about in NY Times, Village Voice, The Drawing Society, Soho News, Artforum, Artiness, Art in America, Tema Celeste, and Arts to name a few.

Sylvia Maier attended the School of Visual Art, The National Academy of Design and the New York Academy. She studied at the Art Student’s League with Ron Sherr and Harvey Dinnerstein, and is a recipient of the prestigious Greenshield Award and numerous merit scholarships. Her paintings have been shown at the Parish Museum in Southampton, Rush, solo show at The Corridor , Lincoln Center, solo shows at the Forum Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany, and in numerous other solo and selected shows throughout the U.S. and Germany. She has been a figurative painter for over 25 years. She has worked with the US State Departments’ Art in Embassies Program.  Her paintings have been to several “art for life” events,  bringing art to underprivileged urban kids. Her work was featured in the Wall Street Journal. Her client list includes Mars (the candy company) and M&M’s has commissioned her several times for the Super Bowl events, commercials. Her clients include Jeep, the TV show “White Collar '' art for films  and the “Dan Zanes and Friends show. She has worked with Spike Lee on an exhibition of paintings as well as on a public service announcement/commercial to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – for which Spike chose 30 of her paintings.

Tara Lewis creates paintings that dive into cultural anthropology with a pop twist. Lewis creates large scale oil portraits of models wearing t-shirts, pageant sashes and other wearables designed and printed by the artist that center on evolving perceptions of youth, irreverence, beauty, identity, culture trends, empowerment, social issues and pop culture, often referring to past decades and pre-internet sources in refreshed and boldly mundane and relevant ways, depicting raw candor with generic props. Her models bring their own character and prop handling to the portrait session at her studio, which is a collaborative process. Lewis' work is held in many major collections, including Amy & John Phelan and Beth Rudin DeWoody. Lewis often presents new paintings at special events and project reveals at her studio in New York City. Lewis pursued her undergraduate art degree at the University of New Hampshire and graduate degree at Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Lewis is a direct descendant of Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha, one of her primary influences, who also infused typefaces and cultural portraiture into his celebrated and pivotal compositions.