Ernestine’s first show presents the work of Ada Friedman, Tatiana Kronberg, Saira McLaren, and Bobbie Oliver, four artists who are linked by their concerns with movement, process, and abstraction. An afterimage is defined as  “an impression of a vivid sensation (especially a visual image) retained after the stimulus has ceased.” The traces of these artists' processes becomes the image in their poetic abstractions. 

Oliver has painted abstractly since her student days. She often works on the floor, moving her canvases around to shift and scrape pools of paint; their imprint-like residues seep into the canvas, often from the edges, defining voids and presences. She restricts the palette of each painting, frequently working within one color range per canvas. There is a hint of a scientific experiment- as if zooming in to view a color’s tonal range microscopically to get at the core of the emotions it evokes. 

Friedman’s work is similarly physical and spiritual. She sifts between made and found accumulated objects, papers, and drawings, working on several pieces at once. Calendars and lists scatter among non-objective shapes in often flat table-top-like space. Quick gestural marks heighten a sense of speeding time in her paintings. The circle, referencing a clock, an eye, and the moon, among other things, holds particular significance in this work, as many pieces count and explore time. Particularly her ideas and experience of it as non-linear. For instance, matter of factly, while she was 29 years old, she created 29 “Timekeeper” paintings on found gloves. Each with 29 radiating stacked oil lines. 

McLaren’s work encompasses painting, ceramics and fiber arts. Her compositions losely reference landscape, often the sky as its celestial orbs and weather appear to move across our field of vision. Tufts of wool, like wisps of clouds, mirror painted brush strokes as she mines the juncture of painting with the traditionally craft-based medium of wool-working. Wavering unstretched surfaces amplify the physical presence of her work. Saturated colors, that McLaren dyes herself, heighten the sense of rhythm and movement in her compositions. 

Kronberg’s photographs are made from folding and unfolding photo paper while she moves her body and objects across a light-sensitive surface in her darkened studio. The element of chance is central to these dark encounters. Deep color and juxtapositions of partial images with abstraction heighten the mystery and sensuality of her images.

Ada Friedman
Friedman’s art is rooted in drawing and painting. She directs plays and makes ceramics, installations, drawings, paintings, and performances that connect. Her work exists in different fields of action and poetry – varying spaces of concreteness, collaboration, and interiority. Friedman’s work is attuned to routine and rituals. It is moved by a holistic drive to make worlds.
She has had recent solo and two-person shows at Grifter, NYC (2020) and Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2018) and her plays or time-based paintings have been staged in NYC at All Saints Church, Safe Gallery, and White Columns. Friedman has been included in group shows at Situations, NYC; Adds Donna, Chicago; and Redling Fine Art, LA, among many others. She holds an MFA in Painting from Bard College, where she was the recipient of the Hartog Travel Grant and has participated in residencies at such places as Shandaken Projects, NY and Clay Break at The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Friedman is a founding member of Essex Flowers, an artist-run cooperative gallery in NYC. She was a Visiting Artist in the Painting and Drawing Dept. at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville 2021-22. Friedman lives and works in NYC.

Tatiana Kronberg
Originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, Tatiana Kronberg is a New York-based artist. Her work has been shown at JOAN in Los Angeles, CA, Shanaynay in Paris, France, Adds Donna in Chicago, IL, Regina Rex in New York, NY, Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA among other venues. Tatiana is a member of the artist-run gallery Essex Flowers, New York, NY. She received her MFA from the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies in 2006.

Saira McLaren
Saira McLaren is a Canadian artist living and working in the Catskills and New York City. Her work is rooted in the landscape, both the external and internal world we move through. Perceptions of reality, repressions and illusions are explored in the intersection of representation and abstraction. McLaren has mounted solo exhibitions at Sargent's Daughters in New York and has been included in group exhibitions in Toronto, Los Angeles and Dusseldorf. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, New York Magazine and TimeOut.

Bobbie Oliver
Bobbie Oliver lives and works in New York and Rock Valley, NY. She has exhibited in New York at High Noon Gallery, Hionas Gallery, Feature Gallery, Showroom, Valentine Gallery as well as solo shows in Toronto at the Olga Korper Gallery, in Los Angeles at the Jancar Gallery and The George Gallery in Laguna Beach. She has received awards from The Canada Council, The Ontario Arts Council, The New York State Council for the Arts and the Pollock Krasner Foundation.
Born in Canada, she spent 10 years in England working and studying in her formative years. After moving to New York, she worked for Isamu Noguchi and La Monte Young and then taught painting at Princeton University, School of Visual Arts, NY, Banff School of Arts, Canada and The Rhode Island School of Design where she taught painting and drawing and served as Head of the Painting Department.  She also taught at the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan and the Rhode Island School of Design in Rome, Italy.