“Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia” is an exhibition that took place at THERE, located at 135 W. 26th Street, 9B in New York City, June 1-8, 2024, and continues online indefinitely.

“Tangibilia” features work by Einspruch since the artist relocated from Boston to five wooded acres in southern New Hampshire in 2022. Influenced by alternative comics and American figurative modernism, Einspruch began to explore scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space. The resulting images are sourced from imagination and memory, composed intuitively, and rendered with a careful but lush application of broad areas of color. The exhibition includes recent paintings in oil and egg tempera, as well as prints in mokuhanga and white-line woodcut.

THERE is the exhibition space of Zeuxis, an association of still life painters. Einspruch contributed to Conversations: 23 Interviews with Still Life Artists, a monograph produced by Zeuxis.

Tangibilia is a coinage of Philip Guston’s that appears in a few places in the compilation of his talks and conversations titled I Paint What I Want to See. He used it to describe the common objects that began to interest him after his turn away from abstraction: “a shoe, a book, a hand.” Doing so struck him as “an even greater enigma” than abstraction, “Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity.” He echoed Giorgio Morandi: “Nothing is more abstract than reality.”

I come out of a dual background in illustration and abstract painting and have long sought ways to make figurative paintings that honor the aspirations of modernist abstraction. Mostly that meant using high volumes of paint to make pictures from observation, sort of a greatly magnified Impressionism. My work transformed completely upon moving to agricultural New Hampshire. Informed about equally by some favorite alternative comics and the Milton Avery exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2022, I started rendering scenes using outlined shapes in an aggressively flattened space. They are wholly invented and synthetic, with slight concessions to naturalism and nearly none to observation. The physicality of the paint remains important but I’m trying to achieve a sense of visual pressure through facture rather than sheer quantity. These shifts in emphasis allowed for some experiments in printmaking.

The images coalesced around scenarios in which touch plays a meaningful role: gardening, knitting, lovemaking, the act of painting itself. “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing,” wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.” That fabric is tangibilia, and I’m interested in art that relishes contact with it.

While working as an artist and teacher out of his New Hampshire studio, Franklin Einspruch is also an art critic who contributes regularly to The New Criterion. He is a Fulbright scholar (Austria 2018-19), in which capacity he was the Fulbright-Q21/MuseumsQuartier Artist-In-Residence in Vienna. He is the proprietor of Dissident Muse, which includes a publishing imprint and an online curatorial project, the Dissident Museum, which will launch in the Summer of 2024 thanks to an inaugural FAIR in the Arts Grant from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. He is the editor of Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard, which Allworth Press published in January 2024, and Backseat Driver by James Croak, which Dissident Muse published in December 2023. He has been blogging about art since 2000, most recently at Dissident Muse Journal at Substack. His website is franklin.art.

William Corwin, Franklin Einspruch: Tangibilia, Tussle, June 6, 2024

Greg Cook, Franklin Einspruch Distilling Everyday Life, Wonderland, August 4, 2024

For more information, contact Franklin Einspruch at dissidentmuse@proton.me.