Around and Also
David Schell & Leslie Roberts
September 6 - October 12, 2025
David Schell
David Schell is an artist working in Portland, Oregon. He received an MFA from AmericanUniversity and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His recent work exploreshow form relates to absence as well as the fusion of painting and sculpture. He is the co-author of The Semi-Finalist, a painting focused blog featuring interviews by Schell andcolumns by the artist, writer, and gallerist Benjamin Terrell.
Some recent shows include: An Arrangement at Nine Gallery (Portland, OR, 2024), Open at57W57ARTS (NY, NY, 2024), Casual Plans, at Augen Gallery (Portland, Oregon, 2023);Vessels at One Wall Gallery (Eugene, Oregon, 2024); Conditional at 57W57ARTS (NYC,2022); and Current Surroundings at WSU Vancouver (Vancouver, Washington, 2022); andintimate, intimate at Augen Gallery (2021).
Leslie Roberts
Leslie Roberts makes paintings driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has exhibited in the US and abroad, at galleries including Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, 57W57Arts, Markel Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); and the Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland.) She received grants fromthe Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations in 2024. Residencies include Yaddo, Dora Maar House, Ucross, Ragdale, Willapa Bay AIR, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Skowhegan. Roberts holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College. She is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Around and Also
On, by, among. And, because, in addition. Six of the dozen or so prepositions and conjunctions that I’ve been thinking about in the studio. Part of what drives my recent work is an interest in the relationship between the interior and the exterior of each shape that I make. How I get around, over, and through them (the preposition part) - and how they connect with their surroundings (the conjunction part) - is a set of open-ended formal questions that I keep coming back to. Color and texture are part of the answer. Letting the work develop outside of strictly defined media and processes is also key. As a result, the paintings have a lot of sculptural qualities, and the sculptures are painterly.
As material as this series is meant to be, I like how it can also suggest something beyond itself: life is clunky and irregular. It has missing pieces and porous boundaries. So does my work.
Some prepositions of place:
In
Through
Across
Above
Over
Down
With
Beside
Beneath
Between
Some conjunctions:
Since
So
Either...or
If
Where
Because
Yet
Not only... but also
David Schell, 2025
Around & Also
“CHILDREN PLAYING, VISITOR PARKING, NO U-TURN, FIRE LANE, QUIET STREET . . .”
Road signs, names for the color red, bird species that are blue, excerpts from personal ads: these are some lists that, in these paintings, are transformed into color and line. I examine the flood of information surrounding us and record words that typically go unnoticed.Then I map handwritten words into forms I couldn’t otherwise invent, applying self-devised rules. Simple systems yield unexpected color, in formations that are pattern-like but satisfyingly irregular. These paintings are written and visual artifacts of experience.
Leslie Roberts, 2025
