Two Milwaukee Artists in Dialogue at Galerie Kenilworth's 'Within and Against' At Galerie Kenilworth

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“Within and Against” show at Galerie Kenilworth by Brennen Steines and Emily Tripp

Artists Brennen Steines and Emily Tripp share a penchant for jarring, colorful and tactile formal painting. They also share recently-minted diplomas from the art program at UW-Milwaukee, and a studio in Bay View, where their work is generated in close proximity. This raft of affiliations begs one to consider how much each artist’s practice feeds off the other; whether their relationship is complementary or simply coincidental. Those questions, along with 17 paintings, are on display at Galerie Kenilworth in their two-person show “Within and Against”, through Jan. 6.

Whatever the conditions of their mutual studio setup, it’s hard to imagine that workspace allows their paintings to sing like they do in Galerie Kenilworth’s palatial ground floor setting. With its polished terrazzo floors, high ceilings and glorious natural light, the gallery presents about as desirable a setting to show paintings as one could dream up.

Tripp’s painting is more intuitive and gestural than Steines’. Her piece The Struggle of Fish Swimming Upstream promises representational meaning but ultimately satisfies on non-representational terms. Whatever it wants to be called, it is a manifestly gorgeous work of art, with luscious light blue and off-white passages rising up the face of a 6-foot x 4-foot canvas. But, as handsome as it is, it’s also a structurally inventive and well-choreographed display of confident and thoughtful brushwork that will bring pause to nerdy painters and casual viewers alike. She hits similar notes with smaller paintings in the show, such as the icy cool Chicago, whose title further suggests the personal and symbolic inspiration for her paintings. It’s a bite-sized delectation, but her larger works ultimately take the day, especially when one considers the macho history of large-scale formal painting from abstract expressionism through zombie formalism–seeing monumentally bold, gut-punching paintings from a young female artist’s perspective just happens to be extra-satisfying.

Tripp’s and Steines’ works are interspersed throughout the gallery in quiet and tastefully curated dialogue. They are finally easy enough to distinguish from one another. Neither sacrifices painterly independence on the altar of the group exhibition, and thus the question about symbiosis and/or coincidence finds a partial answer. Steines’ paintings unpack alternative and post-painterly strategies on top of traditional abstraction, leaving them with a residue of mechanical orderliness. Their titles, too, contribute to this read. Names like Strata and Vestige refer to the space and circumstances of painting, where Tripp’s refer more to the act of living and feeling outside it; compositional analysis versus representational synthesis. Strata is a small canvas that looks to have emerged from a murky sequence of additive and subtractive steps, maybe involving sanding, troweling, and corrugated cardboard. It helps that he’s a naturally good composer and colorist; this one in complementary deep-blue and rust of roughly the same value. Its visual appeal prevents his analytics from turning solipsistic.

Some of his paintings flirt with a faux-finished superficiality, but the risks and inventions clearly visible in the surrounding work confirms the rigor of his practice. Because of this, Steines (like many process-heavy painters) benefits from showing in series and multiples. Two small paintings nearby, Anemia 1 and 2, take his love of process in a different direction, employing a clever combination of erasures and layered reworking, where the canvas ends up degraded and frayed in some areas and built up in others. They’re weird, they’re smart and very well-proportioned. Brains as well as brawn. This goes for the larger canvases, too. His vision and voice build with each painting, leaving one greedy for more.

“Within and Against” profiles each artist’s independent visions as well as their complementary relationship. Tripp’s intuitive looseness emphasizes Steines’ procedural rigor, and vice-versa. One continues to wonder how much this balance developed inside the crucible of the studio. In other words: how much “within” and how much “against?” Imagine two goldfish living in a shared bowl, each bringing its own biology and returning productive and symbiotic biofeedback, growing all the while to exactly the right size for their mutual environment. In the process, they make us look and wonder how large each will eventually grow outside that shared fishbowl.