A Figure Enters

The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Paul Narkiewicz, curated by Megan Mi-Ai Lee. In the past ten years, Narkiewicz has created over 600 iterations of an abstract human figure in clay. Inflected by his background in painting and printmaking, each figure is composed of individual slabs of clay that are textured, pigmented, cut, and assembled into distinct figures using nichrome wire. This exhibition brings together 50 of these sculptures, representing an overview of his production and stylistic evolution over the past decade, and presents them with a selection of his watercolors capturing the Italian countryside from the 1970s.

Paul Narkiewicz is a New York-based artist. Narkiewicz earned his BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and has been working in ceramics at Greenwich House Pottery since 2010. Exhibitions of his work include Laurence Miller Gallery (New York, NY; 2015, 2016), Socrates Sculpture Park (Long Island City, NY; 1987), and Kornblee Gallery (New York, NY; 1981). His work is held in numerous collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the RISD Museum, and the University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art). A master printmaker, Narkiewicz collaborated with many artists on their lithograph and etching editions, including Romare Bearden, Alex Katz and Ellsworth Kelly.

Megan Mi-Ai Lee is an artist based in Queens, New York. She earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2018. Lee has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Storm King Art Center, and Smack Mellon, and was the 2018 Curatorial Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park. Recent exhibitions of her work include Godwin-Ternbach Museum (Flushing, NY; 2022), Art Lot (Brooklyn, NY; 2022), and Park View/Paul Soto (Los Angeles, CA; 2020). Lee is currently the Education Manager at Greenwich House Pottery.