No Time

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present No Time, an exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Michael Ambron in the gallery’s main space. No Time, curated by OyG Co-Directors Zahar Vaks and Lauren Whearty, is the artist’s first solo show, including both recent works and paintings slowly developed over years. Ambron’s wildly experimental approaches to painting include working with found substrates, collaged fabrics and packaging materials, surprising additives to his handmade paints, and unconventional tools and applications of various media. Michael Ambron not only uses paint to achieve the mark of a color, but to investigate paint’s materiality and broad possibilities. Ambron describes his paintings as being, “dozens of layers deep and composed of hundreds of drawings. Their surfaces are compressed skins whose protruding contours reveal points of contact with once visible forms.” As a professional paint maker, Ambron is both an artist and a chemist, experimenting and playing within the confines of each material’s limits and properties. Colors bounce and vibrate off of one another on surfaces that vary from smooth matte paint to raw burlap, or paint thick with ground stone, soil, or diamond dust. Ambron’s varied and layered paintings are rich with crags, crevices and scrapes, yet they maintain an openness and lightness even as we recognize these textured, heavy, and collaged materials. Ambron’s use of “erasure, removal, and blocking out of various elements creates a tension between that which is familiar and present and that which is absent or past.” Ambron’s methods hone in on the overwhelming simultaneity of our time. Rigorous investigations of and curiosity about his own perceptions, dreams, and worries are made visual through gestures, symbols, and blips of imagery that unfold in a kind of floating and timeless space. Ambron’s paintings immerse the viewer in a loop of wild visions, cartoon violence, lived experiences, and catastrophic world events. They create a vibrating feeling of absurdity and urgency, yet their vibrant colors, repetitious gestures, and familiar looking cartoon hands and eyeballs are reminiscent of watching the world’s chaos by flipping through TV channels or scrolling through digital media. The buzz of this content and the presence of constant disruptions is made digestible with his ease of gesture - and moments of humor and levity that emanate from layer to layer. Michael Ambron (b. 1984) is a visual artist based in New York. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His work has been exhibited at Jeffrey Deitch in NYC, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, The Ice Box in Philadelphia, The Wilber Mansion in Oneonta, NY, The Dublin Cultural Arts Council in Ohio, Work Gallery in Ann Arbor, MI, Memorial Hall Gallery at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has been featured in publications for Maake Magazine and ArtCritical. Michael has been a recipient of the The Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship, The Fergus Memorial Scholarship, The Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, and most recently the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Materials Grant. Ambron is the owner and operator of Paint Makers Notes LLC, an organization that offers paint making services, educational workshops, and professional consultation to artists and art based institutions working with raw materials. He currently lives and works in Long Island City, NY. Zahar Vaks (born Tashkent, Uzbekistan) has had exhibitions nationally and internationally. His solo show “Rap Painting” is currently up at Slag & RX Gallery in New York, NY. Vaks participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency; the Galveston Artist Residency; and most recently in the Artists in Residence (AIR) program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2021. He was recently awarded the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant. Lauren Whearty is a painter, educator, & curator based in Philadelphia. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University, and BFA from Tyler School of Art. She has been a Co-Director at OyG Projects since 2017. Whearty has attended Yale’s Summer School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Soaring Garden, and Golden Foundation residencies. She has recently received grants from Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and Joseph Roberts Foundation. Whearty currently teaches at The University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia.