Best of Seven

Kellen Hatanaka

Martín Kazanietz

Lauren Krasnoff

Henry David Rosenberg

Abri Mars is thrilled to present Best of Seven, a group exhibition curated by Rhys Cowan featuring works by Kellen Hatanaka, Martín "Gordopelota" Kazanietz, Lauren Krasnoff, and Henry David Rosenberg. Expressed through distinct approaches to painting, these four artists investigate the observed and unobserved rituals that contribute to the spectacle of sport.

Drawing on Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, Best of Seven examines the relationship between the spectacle of sport and the individuals who both shape and are shaped by it. The broadcast decides what is seen. The bodies, crowds, and histories around it hold what is not.

Kellen Hatanaka's paintings bring attention to an underserved staple of Asian-American identity within Canada, the Vancouver Asahi. His figure in Nomo is in motion, contorted against a background that is caught between stability and motion. Similar to the struggles of Japanese citizens during World War II, which led to the dismantling of the Japanese Vancouver professional baseball team.

In Martín Kazanietz's work, the unknown stars of the Argentine barrios in Un Arquero Sin Guantes and Un Arquero Revolcado. Where football is connectivity, and the need extends beyond age and physical ability. His characters flail haphazardly, almost comically, with no ball in sight. Their effort within their aging frames and dirtied uniforms draws the eye.

The crowds of Lauren Krasnoff's work collide and mold, where the individual is seen but sometimes lost in the swirl of action and colors, creating feverish and lively landscapes that create the noise of excitement, but also the enraptured observance. Where someone ends and the crowd begins becomes hard to tell.

Henry David Rosenberg depicts textured, dreamlike compositions reimagining the figure of the athlete. They occupy space in the everyday, operating through seemingly mundane tasks, carrying an unspoken importance. Their presence and attention saying more than the uniforms they're wearing.

Kellen Hatanaka (b. 1987 Toronto, Canada, lives and works in Stratford, Ontario) makes vibrant, figurative paintings and works on paper that examine the constructs of the sporting body through race, tradition, and Japanese Canadian experience. His recent work centers on the Vancouver Asahi, the championship baseball team disbanded in 1941 when its players were forcibly removed and incarcerated during the Second World War, whose rise and erasure become a measure of identity and culture lost. Selected exhibitions include OCHI, Los Angeles, California; Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre, Burnaby, Canada; Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; The Naughton Gallery at Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland; Voltz Clarke Gallery, New York; Rusha & Co., Los Angeles, California. Hatanaka has received multiple Canada Council for the Arts grants and, with Jon-Erik Lappano, the Governor General's Award for the book Tokyo Digs a Garden. Hatanaka studied Illustration at the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

Martín Kazanietz (b. 1985 Buenos Aires, Argentina, lives and works in Viedma, Patagonia) worked briefly as a designer before learning to paint through graffiti and assisting established local muralists in his twenties. His work is almost exclusively dedicated to fútbol culture in Argentina and its social side, an alternative to the hyper-industrialized world of modern global sport. He has painted murals in small barrio clubs such as San Telmo, Club Atlético Victoria de Villa Bosch, and Quilmes, as well as at the most important stadiums in Argentina; the iconic La Bombonera (Boca Juniors), Racing Club, Independiente, Rosario Central, and Belgrano de Córdoba. He has exhibited in galleries, fairs, and institutions locally and internationally, including SFMOMA, Mana Contemporary, Institut Français de Madrid, UPV Valencia, Palazzo Monti in Brescia, and Casa del Bicentenario. He has contributed as an illustrator to sports publications including So Foot, Victory Journal, Mundial, Pickles, Season Annual, Zeit, Orsai, and Oof Magazine, and in 2025 founded his own fútbol art and culture magazine, Futcon. Kazanietz studied graphic design at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Lauren Krasnoff (b. 2000 New Jersey, lives and works between Jersey City, New Jersey and Madison, Wisconsin) is a painter whose subject matter is rooted in contemporary sports, examining the rituals and choreography of fans as a mirror for broader social behavior. Her work oscillates between representation and abstraction, with an emphasis on collective emotion, movement, and the physicality of paint itself. Selected exhibitions include Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, California; Zepster Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; Harper's, East Hampton, New York; Spring/Break Art Show, New York; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey; The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey. Krasnoff holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BFA from Rutgers University, New Brunswick New Jersey.

Henry David Rosenberg (b. 1997 New York, New York, where he lives and works) is an artist and curator whose interdisciplinary practice spans printmaking, installation, and printed fabrics, engaging themes of cultural exchange, history, materiality, and the social dynamics embedded within images and objects. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at A365 Gallery, and is held in public and private collections, including the South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Rosenberg earned an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Rome; and a BA in Art History and Visual Culture from Denison University, and has held positions with the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, and Marginal Editions. Rosenberg is Co-Director of the alternative space OK Gallery and has worked as curator and archivist for the Estate of Matthew Freedman.