Photographed by: Adrian Wilson

An exhibition curated by Heskin Projects:
Elizabeth Heskin, Tracey Ravdin Perlmutter, and Patricia Spergel

No matter how chaotic and stressful the political or personal world we inhabit becomes, the natural world consistently follows its own cyclical rules. Every spring the bare architecture of trees fills with yellow, white or pink blossoms; hyacinths, daffodils and tulips pop up, and before we blink, everything in May is blooming. Green leaves unfurl on tree branches and all surfaces are covered in sticky chartreuse pollen. The four artists in BLOOMING each draw from the external world of nature as well as from sources as varied as geological maps, Aboriginal song-line paintings, mandalas and decorative tiles.   The through line connecting them is the depth of their talent and the clarity of their investigation into paint and its properties.  While “blooming” is most commonly defined as “flowering, flourishing or prospering”; these four painters expand the definition to include “exhibiting freshness of ideas and beauty”.  And we can all absolutely use more beauty right now.

Blooming will be on view at 1GAP Gallery through 8/25/25.  The gallery is located at 1 Grand Army Plaza, across the street from the Brooklyn Library, a few short blocks from the Brooklyn Art Museum, and easily accessible by subway.

Please make an appointment to view the exhibition. For further information, please email: Eheskin@gmail.com.

About the Artists:

Patricia Fabricant (b. NYC) received her BA from Wesleyan University and studied painting in Florence, Italy. She is a painter, curator, and award-winning book designer whose paintings have been exhibited widely.  Fabricant lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her repetitive patterned lines, complex layering, and color relationships create a wonderful, vibrational tension.  There is a palpable, pulsing energy in Fabricant’s paintings--expanding and contracting almost like a heartbeat.  It is impossible to look away from these mesmerizing, maximalist works.

Shirley Irons (b. Pittsburgh, PA)  received a degree from Parsons School of Design/The New School for Social Research and has lived and worked in NYC since the 1970s.  She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and continues to teach at the School of Visual Arts.  Irons’ carefully observed paintings of flowers, in and out of vases, capture the moment after full bloom as they are in the process of decaying.  There is a quiet beauty in these natural compositions that avoids sweetness by capturing the waning luminosity and fragility of the flowers and plants, striking an emotional chord in the viewer.

Evelyn Twitchell (b. Wellesley, MA) received her BA from the University of Rochester and her MFA from Parsons School of Design.  She has exhibited and taught extensively in the tri-state area and beyond, and currently splits her residence between Brooklyn and rural Pennsylvania. Twitchell’s painted abstractions are initially drawn from observed nature and through the alchemy of erasing, redrawing, painting and scraping, she transforms these highly active surfaces into meditative studies of intangible experiences. These paintings reward slow looking--drawing the viewer into their deceptively quiet yet profound world.

Kit Warren (b. Philadelphia, PA) received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts.  She has exhibited extensively and has won numerous grants and residencies.  Warren lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Her luminous and velvety paintings are an amalgamation of golden dots and powder pigments layered with small repetitive marks which appear and retreat the longer the viewer stares at them.  They draw inspiration from aerial views of land masses and oceans among other natural phenomena (as hinted at in Warren’s poetic titles).  But these sources are just the stepping stones for an entire world of intricate configurations balancing symmetry and asymmetry, unity and dispersion.