Alice Mackler

Kerry Schuss Gallery is pleased to present new works by Alice Mackler, who is celebrating her ninety-second birthday this week. This exhibition features new ceramic sculpture and paintings created in 2022 and 2023. There is a fresh take on the figurative ceramic sculptural work Mackler is well known. Mackler, who refers to herself as "a painter who makes sculptures," shows this process clearly with a series of updated forms activated by loose, expressionistic brush strokes of glaze which she applies with a sensitive touch. All of her sculptures are created and inspired from specific drawings Mackler has made in previous years.

Mackler's mixed media paintings combine earlier drawings circa 2003, attached to canvases, and paint and drawing is then applied to small canvases to create new framing borders. The figurative drawings, which form the basis of her painting work, were all created in life drawing sessions with models.

This exhibition is the artist's sixth solo exhibition with Kerry Schuss Gallery since starting 2013.

In 2023, a ceramic sculpture by Alice Mackler entered the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. A monograph on her work published in 2021 by New York Consolidated and Gregory Miller & Co. in association with Kerry Schuss Gallery featuring a forward by Matthew Higgs, an essay by Kelly Taxter, and an interview by Joanne Greenbaum.

Alice Mackler (b. 1931, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. Mackler began making artwork in high school in Williamstown, MA and later attended the Art Students League New York, studying painting with Will Barnett from 1952-54. More than thirty years later, Mackler returned to her arts education andreceived a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1988. In 1999, Mackler began working with clay at Greenwich House Pottery, where she was awarded the Residency and Fellowship program in 2016 and where she continues to work today. In 2013, Mackler had her first solo exhibition hosted by Kerry Schuss Gallery, NY, and in 2018, kaufmann repetto presented a solo exhibition of Mackler's ceramics in Milan, IT. Mackler's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions most recently at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2023), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018), Maccarone, NY (2016, The Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, AZ (2016),Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NY (2016), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2015) ; The Jewish Museum, NY (2015), The Box, Los Angeles; the Jewish Museum, NY (2015), Kerry Schuss Gallery, NY, Klaus von Nichtssagend, NY (2014); The Box, Los Angeles (2014), among others.