2023

November 17th, 2023 - January 15th, 2024

Abattoir presents the first photography exhibition at the gallery, a selection of prints from a new body of work by Atlanta-based photographer Nydia Blas. The photographs on view, The Silver Woman: Becoming Afro-Latina, were made on a recent trip to Panama where Blas immersed herself in the landscape and history of the Afro-Latino heritage of her father. Part of an ongoing project, this exhibition is the first presentation of Blas’ Panamanian travels and research of the land and culture of an unexplored aspect of her family history.

October 22nd - November 16th, 2023

A focused and prolific artist, Skuodas produced thousands of paintings, drawings and artist’s books that explore the boundaries between internal and external realities. Her work veers between the figurative and abstract, often combining recurring motifs of ovals, dots and geometric linear patterns with elongated figures and hands. 

September 14th - October 14th, 2023 

Slip Lanes, a solo exhibition of new works by Gianna Commito at Abattoir, features geometric abstractions that are spatially, materially and conceptually rich, each painting negotiating a complex array of interlocking shapes and patterns, color and surface, volume and flatness. Unflaggingly, Commito’s paintings compress the history of geometric abstraction with nods or recognition towards Analytic Cubism, the shallow organic abstractions of Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Precisionism of Charles Demuth.

June 2nd - July 29th, 2023

With State of the State, Katie Butler’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, she continues to make allegorical still life paintings that provide critical commentary on contemporary American politics. This series responds specifically to the current political climate in the state of Ohio. Conservatives in power are working to implement extremist laws that most Ohioans do not support. Butler concentrates on two issues in particular: reproductive rights and gun control. 

April 22nd - May 28th, 2023 

Abattoir presents Violet Hour, a solo show by Cleveland-based painter Dana Oldfather. This is her first solo show with the gallery. In recent years, Oldfather has altered her painting practice from abstraction to a concentration on landscape, blending close observation with an inventive color palette resulting in images laden with moody and emotional overtones. 

April 29th - May 30th, 2023 Foreland Studios, Catskill, NY

For the gallery’s second presentation at Foreland, Abattoir will exhibit the work of interdisciplinary artist, Benedict Scheuer. His introspective drawings invite us to witness his ongoing mental and spiritual exploration; through a unique visual language, glimpses of understanding and belonging emerge.  With a heightened sensitivity and focus on line, these pieces include motifs from the gardens that he tends, his meditative practice and the birds that have become a signature of his work. 

March 4 – April 15th, 2023

Abattoir presents a show of painters addressing the canvas as a site for inquiry and personal reflection. Headspace suggests an indeterminate atmosphere offering opportunity to focus minutely or expand universally. As applied to painting, it can address the relevance of traditional canvas painting and the viewer’s experiential relationship to a painting (as opposed to large-scale art and public space). Eleanor Conover, Georgia Elrod, Fox Hysen, Matthew Kolodziej, Scott Olson, Emil Robinson. 

December 9th, 2022 – February 25, 2023 

Abattoir presents a group exhibit of artists who look at landscape, both rural and urban, through a personal lens, to reach an inner landscape, likened to an element of self- portraiture; ‘the weather inside”. Included artists are Lumen Wakoa, Adrian Eisenhower, Hildur Johnson, Herman Aguirre, Dana Oldfather, and Liv Mette Larsen.

September 3rd – October 8th, 2022

For her first solo show at the gallery, Abattoir introduces new work by Lauren Yeager. The majority of the found materials for this body of work are functional items made from molded plastics–recognizable items in whole or part--given new life in the gallery context. In this practice, Yeager continues a long tradition of lifting the quotidian into the realm of art.

October 15th – December 3rd, 2022

Abattoir Gallery is pleased to present PARK, Shawn Powell’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. These paintings embrace the strictures of reductive or conceptual abstraction, while simultaneously poking fun. Straddling the line between representation and abstraction, these paintings utilize the language of abstraction while simultaneously appearing as trompe l’oeil objects. 

August 6th – 28th, 2022

Foreland, Catskill, NY

For the gallery’s initial presentation in the Hudson valley, Abattoir exhibited paintings by Caitlin MacBride and sculptures by Dominic Palarchio, two artists whose work is shaped significantly by their experience and research around labor and craft.

July 9th – August 13th, 2022  

Abattoir Gallery presents new work by two artists with Midwest roots—Dominic Palarchio and Cameron Granger. Palarchio, who is from Detroit, works primarily in sculpture with byproducts of the automotive industry. Granger, a video artist from Cleveland, now working in Columbus, draws on biographical imagery and histories of urban planning in his pieces.

June 10th – July 2nd, 2022

Cheap Thrills, co-curated by the artists Erykah Townsend and Alex Vlasov, respectively a BFA graduate and fourth year student at the Cleveland Institute of Art. For their first show with Abattoir, the artists created an installation musing on the allure and pitfalls of consumer-driven society, focusing on the consumption of off-brand goods and the culture of discount shopping.

May 7th – June 4th, 2022 

This exhibition brings together two artists who have a long collegial association. Hildur Jónsson makes woven paintings with dyed silk thread, each based on the landscape of her native Iceland. During the pandemic Brinsley Tyrrell began sculpting his newest series, The Pandemic Pieces. In these vessels, the surfaces are richly adorned with patterns, color and structures related to the virus forms and undersea creatures.

April 8th – 30th, 2022 

Abattoir presents Lumin Wakoa and Daniel Graham Loxton, two New York-based artists.  Mid-career painters who approach abstraction from decidedly different points of view, both demand close-looking by working on smaller scale canvas and panels. They share a love of paint and its materiality, evidenced by touch and texture in the work. 

March 4th – April 2nd, 2022 

Near Zero pairs together two generations of complex reductivity. Russell Maltz and Peter Demos are known for their unwavering dedication to sparse aesthetics and a restrained use of materials. They have a near-zero approach to making, employing few variables, resulting in work that is visually minimal and austere. 

February 8th – 27th, 2022 

Abattoir presents a reprise of their NADA Miami exhibition in the gallery, featuring new work by Shawn Powell and Caitlin MacBride. In addition, we introduce two new artists to the gallery, Thomas Spoerndle and Peter Demos. John Pearson will be represented by some of his wall sculptures.

December 2nd – 4th, 2021

Shawn Powell and Caitlin MacBride each explore objecthood in their paintings. In this moment of socially-charged art, these artists mine figuration along singular paths towards raising the familiar into the philosophical. American imagery is central to both artists, who each configure carefully wrought objects into unusual environments, suggesting a conscious nod to second wave Surrealism, American still life, and Pop art traditions. 

November 4th – December 30th, 2021

New Narratives comprises paintings by six young artists, four working in the Cleveland area, two based in Chicago with connection to Mexico and Puerto Rico. The show highlights painters who work in a representational style, developing this idiom in service of narratives of deep importance to each artist. The grouping includes artists Antwoine Washington, Max Markwald, Erykah Townsend, Katie Butler, Herman Aguirre, and Omar Velazquez.

December 9th, 2022 – February 25, 2023 

Abattoir presents a group exhibit of artists who look at landscape, both rural and urban, through a personal lens, to reach an inner landscape, likened to an element of self- portraiture; ‘the weather inside”. Included artists are Lumen Wakoa, Adrian Eisenhower, Hildur Johnson, Herman Aguirre, Dana Oldfather, and Liv Mette Larsen.

September 9th – October 30th, 2021

Abattoir presents a two person show of life-long friends Billy Copley and Allen Ruppersberg, artists who first met in art school at the Chouinard Institute of Art (now Cal Arts) in Los Angeles in 1962. Copley is based in New York; Ruppersberg, from Brecksville, OH, divides his time between Los Angeles and New York.

July 29th – September 1st, 2021

Abattoir presents a new project co-created by Columbus based artists Luke Stettner and Suzanne Silver that brings to fruition their shared conversation of the last 10 months. Photography and poetry are at the heart of this show of exchange, in which drawings and photographs, notes and notebooks, were passed back and forth over the period of the pandemic shut down.

June 18th – July 17th, 2021

The two artists brought together in this show, Michelle Grabner and Sabrina Gschwandtner, explore handcraft techniques as essential foundations of their artistic practice—Michelle in her paintings and sculptures, and Sabrina in her work as a media artist in film, photography and video. Both consider the activities of craft crucial visually, politically, and theoretically as both process and content. 

May 14th – June 2nd, 2021

The ever-present “death of painting” is constantly looming in the shadows of a painted image. In the mid-2010s, a wave of reductive abstract painting labeled Zombie Formalism plagued the art world.  Taking its name from the Ohio-born filmmaker Jim Jarmusch’s recent zombie movie The Dead Don’t Die, this exhibition brings together works of eight artists investigating abstract painting through a variety of approaches, breathing new life into the genre

April 2nd – May 2nd, 2021

Abattoir Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition; Ocultos, Paintings by Herman Aguirre. Stemming from his experience as a first generation Mexican- American living on the south side of Chicago, Aguirre takes on the enormous issues of gang violence, here and in Mexico. The exhibition title, Ocultos, “what is hidden or unseen,” points to the artist’s interest in exposing traumatic events that have affected him, him family and community at large. 

February 5th — March 26th, 2021

Annie Besant’s 1901 Theosophy treatise, *Thought Forms, lays out the principles of that late 19th century hybrid of science and spiritualism in case studies accompanied by elaborate, colorful images. Giving visual voice to the spiritual and emotional plane lies at the root of John Pearson and Scott Olson’s work, both Ohio-based artists who approach this problem of conveying a mystical experience by means of the opposing threads of logic and intuition, meeting happily in a correspondent middle.

November – December, 2020

Abattoir presents a collection of small works from the artists Carrie Beckmann, Jerry Birchfield, Hector Castellanos, Mirjana Ciric, Gianna Commito, Billy Copley, Ryan Dewey, Betty Drake, Adrian Eisenhower, Nick Foster, Bernard Glasgow, Andrew Gonzalez, Angela Gschwind, Hildur Johnson, Leila Khoury, Daniel Loxton, Kristen Newell, Scott Olson, John Pearson, Melinda Placko, Shawn Powell, Kaveri Raina, Billy Ritter, Dante Rodriguez, Luke Stettner, Grace Summanen, Gwenn Thomas, Erykah Townsend, Carmen Winant, Lauren Yeager, and H. Spencer Young.

September 25th — November 7th, 2020

Abattoir introduces two New York-based artists to Cleveland with works that individually respond to the gallery space. Jason Murphy and Gwenn Thomas engage color and form to parse the architectural environment—Murphy addressing volume and mass in his sculptures; Thomas creating perceptual nuance in monochromatic photographic works. 

July 31st – September 12th, 2020

Shawn Powell and Lauren Yeager are Ohio based artists who focus on overlooked quotidian objects in their work, each adopting a philosophical tangent consistent with their commentary and interests. A sly sense of humor is common ground found in both bodies of work. 

June 18th – July 25th, 2020

The inaugural exhibition features recent paintings by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson and Kaveri Raina which bring fabric and surface to the foreground in works of lyrical abstraction. Jónsson, a longtime Clevelander, weaves compositions of silk thread on oversized looms. Raina, based in Brooklyn, paints on burlap, incorporating the texture of her surface by working both sides of the canvas.