Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Making a Mark, a group exhibition of five gallery artists for whom drawing is central to their practice: Josette Urso, Charles Ritchie, Maeve D’Arcy, Dana Piazza and Peter Stephens. The exhibition will be from November 12 - December 19 with an artist reception November 12th from 6-8pm.
Josette Urso’s drawings urgently capture whatever surrounds her: a landscape, a subway car, the view from her apartment, the dinner table. Her acrobatic lines swoop and swerve through an inventive range of mark-making, making visible the energy of a place, a room, a life of ordinary things.
Dana Piazza works meditatively, almost ritualistically. Each drawing begins with a single idiosyncratic line in colored ink, which he repeats, in the same color, over and over until a larger form fills the paper and vibrates with the energy of the mark-making.
For Charles Ritchie, drawing is how he lives in the world. He has made his life’s work using pencil, ink and graphite to capture the way light moves around his home.Vast information is contained in these small works, and their intimate scale invites the viewer to explore each detail and inhabit these spaces.
Peter Stephens draws riotous lines of color that weave in and out of his work in a rhythm that advances and recedes. Nothing is planned. He chooses each color intuitively as the work unfolds, drawing with a precise but unmechanical discipline. Geometry, line and color combine to pull three-dimensional space out of a flat surface, challenging our perception.
Maeve’ D’Arcy’s makes drawings that turn her random thoughts into dashes, x’s, dots and every other sort of repetitive mark. Marks accumulate and resolve into fields and forms, all of which are as arbitrary and intuitive as the thoughts that generated them.
Maeve D’Arcy has exhibited her work in New York, London, and Ireland. She earned her M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in London She has had many residencies including Saltonstall, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. D’Arcy is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts 2025 Queens Arts Fund Grant.
Peter Stephens earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981 and has shown his work nationally and internationally. His work is in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and Burchfield Penney Art Center. He lives and works in Buffalo, New York
Dana Piazza received his BFA from Purchase College, State University of New York, lives in Lenox Massachusetts. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and Canada and is represented in major private and corporate collections.
Charles Ritchie has exhibited his work in public and private galleries throughout the United States. His works are in the collections of Baltimore Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Public Library, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Yale University Art Gallery as well as the private Cartin Collection and the Louis-Dreyfus Collection
Josette Urso has exhibited widely throughout the United States and around the world, and is the recipient of numerous grants, and fellowships including from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
