Winston Wächter Fine Art is pleased to announce our summer group show entitled “Please do not touch.” With inspiration as diverse as Romantic landscape painting, labor economics, musical compositions and the peeling, fading facades of New Orleans, this eclectic grouping of paintings and sculptures is held together by the sensory experience they evoke, and often, the desire for an illicit tactile experience of the surfaces they provoke in the viewer. In a stark contrast to the academic painters of the nineteenth century such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Adolphe William Bouguereau, who produced clean, sanitized surfaces without even the suggestion of a brushstroke, this show invites the viewer to experience the works as surface first, and in some cases, only as surface.

Without quite matching the bold gesture of Meret Oppenheim’s fur covered tea cup, the artists represented in this show play with the viewer’s basic human desire to experience the world through touch as well as sight, and alter the meaning of their work in the process. Mink, sequins, gold and silver leaf mingle here with the traditional media of oil, wax, resin and acrylic. These last, less obviously tactile surfaces, are nevertheless given a rich and complex treatment in the hands of our artists. This exhibition includes works by painters Nicole Charbonnet, Kris Cox, Susan Dory, Betsy Eby, Heather Hutchison, Christine Maxon, Shane McAdams, Erin Parish, Chris Reilly, Tony Scherman, Michael Schultheis, Andrea Shapiro and Hiro Yokose. The exhibition will also include sculptures by Ann Gardner and Robert Taplin.

These surfaces call out to be examined but please, do not touch.

For further information please contact Amanda Snyder at [212] 327 2526