Joyce Kubat’s People To Inhabit The Walls of Guild Hall
This fall, Guild Hall’s Spiga Gallery plays host to a series of eerie human figures drawn from artist Joyce Kubat’s reservoir of knowledge of the intersection of human emotion, psychology and anatomy.
“My People” is on view Saturday, Oct. 26 through Monday, Dec. 30.
In this exhibition, Ms. Kubat assembles her people, a body of work which she has been developing since 2002.
Her media has remained the same and she lets the process lead the way in her deeply psychological figurative works.
From pastels applied to damp paper, creating a liquid soft skin with deep velvet pigments, to fluid pink inks that have the transparency of flesh, these materials have led her to convey an emotionally raw narrative of human anatomy.
“The figure has always been my focus, and over the years it’s become a psychological focus, a not-always-easy-to-view focus,” writes Ms. Kubat. “Art with only surface excitement seems empty. For me it has to have a serious and profound underpinning, always poignant, often humorous, relating in some way to the universal humanity common to all of us.”
Joyce Kubat is the Top Honors recipient of the 79th Guild Hall Artist Members Exhibition in 2017. she was selected by guest awards juror Ruba Katrib who was curator at the Sculpture Center and now curator at MoMA PS1.
Ms. Kubat holds a BS in Psychology from Michigan State University and continued her studies in New York City at both Brooklyn College and Art Students League of New York. She lives and works in Huntington, NY and has exhibited throughout Long Island, New York City, Italy, and elsewhere.
On view concurrently is “Abstract Expressionism Revisited: Selections from the Guild Hall Museum Permanent Collection,” curated by Dr. Joan Marter, celebrating the outstanding collection of Abstract Expressionist art owned by Guild Hall.
Abstract Expressionism was an avant-garde movement of the 1950s that resulted, in part, from the dynamic interplay of artists working on the East End.
Among the participants in this “artist colony” of the Hamptons were permanent residents and summer visitors.
Painters included Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, James Brooks and Charlotte Park, Robert Motherwell, and Grace Hartigan among others.
Presentation of many works that have not been exhibited in recent years, also brings attention to the digitization of the Guild Hall collection that was completed recently.
The Museum has been building a significant collection of Abstract Expressionist works, and prime examples will be combined with loans by artists who created their work on the East End.
A member’s reception to celebrate the opening of both exhibitions will be held on Sunday, Oct. 27 from 2 to 4 p.m.
