Quintessa Matranga’s works are more than simple studies of objects. She is less interested in developing a critical apparatus for the medium of painting, its market supremacy, and its constant rejuvenation amidst the genre-specific impasses of art history. Rather she has developed a method of image making that is uniquely figurative and conceptual; by adjoining form and concept she generates a multiplicity of connotations and narratives. Extraneous legs offer a new read on a familiar object. Matranga says she “is against idealization and sentimentality, and in favor of hysteria and destabilization.”

Quintessa Matranga (born 1989, New York) lives and works in San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions include What Pipeline, Detroit, Sandy Brown, Berlin, and Queer Thoughts, New York. Selected group exhibitions include Karma International, Los Angeles, Pilar Corias, London, Carlos Ishikawa, London, and Bureau, New York. Solo exhibitions are concurrently on view at What Pipeline and at The Meeting, NYC, through October 2022.

View her current solo exhibition at whatpipeline.com

Cay Bahnmiller was legendary not only for her prodigious output but also for her presence, which could be charming or destructive. She had a fervent appetite for languages, architecture, philosophy, poetry, literature, and art. Her work infused these subjects with an intense lived experience that was at times emotionally fraught. She spent her youth in Argentina and Germany, and words like Rosada and Ihre Shuhe run through works like threads. But Detroit, the city of her birth, was her obsession. She returned to Detroit in the late 1970s, after the peak of the Cass Corridor art movement, a wave of abstract expressionism that utilized gritty materials and gave form to the disillusionment of the post-industrial working class. In letters to friends filled paradoxically with self-doubt and self-assurance, she questioned the city’s ability to support her, but could not leave. She wrote that while her sculptural “constructions deal primarily with the essence of light and the biography of Nature, the urban site as the natural, the abstraction of the city and archaeological sedimentation of light and form still influences the work.”

Cay Bahnmiller (b. 1955 Wayne, MI; d. 2007 Detroit) received a BFA Summa Cum Laude from the University of Michigan in 1976. She exhibited at Feigenson Gallery and Susanne Hilberry Gallery and was collected by Gil and Lila Silverman. Her work is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. An upcoming solo exhibition at While Columns, NYC will take place in November 2022.

View her solo exhibition at whatpipeline.com