Josh Meier and Madeline Peckenpaugh at Towards

Artists: Josh Meier and Madeline Peckenpaugh

Exhibition title: Josh Meier and Madeline Peckenpaugh

Venue: Towards, Toronto, Canada

Date: October 27 – December 9, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Towards, Toronto

Towards is pleased to present Josh Meier and Madeline Peckenpaugh, a two-person exhibition of recent paintings.

Working across painting, printmaking, and collage, the two artists investigate the possibilities of transformation – and the ways in which memory, materiality and meaning are continually being made and remade throughout this process.

In discussing her work, Madeline Peckenpaugh has referred to her paintings as “psychological, abstracted landscapes, pulled from memory and the changes in my everyday environment…” Working intuitively, she builds up her compositions through thin layers of colour, before scraping them back, constructing a sort of gestural palimpsest, and revealing traces of what has come before. This exploration of pigment, surface, and mark-making is fundamental to Peckenpaugh’s practice. Hovering between representation and abstraction, her paintings seem to oscillate with energy. Bursts of tightly controlled, staccato like brushstrokes give way to larger, sweeping gestural marks that imbue a vitality and dynamism to the paintings.

Josh Meier’s practice is concerned with the ways in which memory, materiality and meaning intersect with one another. Utilizing a combination of painting, printmaking and collage, he creates intimate works that draw upon multiple sets of references, from literature and philosophy to art history and his own personal set of experiences. The resulting artworks are both materially and conceptually dense, with Meier constructing motifs and a distinct visual vocabulary of open-ended associations that he weaves across his practice. Through his work, he highlights the complex and often highly personal set of conditions in which meaning is made.

Josh Meier received an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the University of Kansas. Recent exhibitions include Soundless Sunless, Soloway Gallery, New York, 2023; Mediating Bodies, Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; Painting: New Approaches, Chan Gallery, Pomona College, Claremont, CA (both 2022); 20/20, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY (2020); and After Hours, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI (2019).

Madeline Peckenpaugh (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) renders depth through iterations of adding and subtracting paint, creating a semblance of deep and flat space simultaneously. Peckenpaugh shifts the scale of everyday elements, interlaces components, and depicts forms in both single tones and fluctuating textures. The resulting optical illusions often resemble imagined, otherworldly landscapes.

Peckenpaugh received an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Unit London, UK; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA; and Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, PA, among others. Her work is included in the public collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Ghent House, Columbia County, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.