Debs & Co. is a contemporary art gallery. We exhibit emerging and mid-career artists, with an emphasis on politically relevant work. The gallery is located at 525 W. 26th Street, 2nd Floor, New York City.



Our most recent exhibitions:

Richard Renaldi

Chuck Nanney

Amy Jean Porter

The World's A Mess...

Emily Jacir

Aaron Cobbett

Nina Katchadourian

Carrie Moyer

Stefanie Nagorka

Sandow Birk

Other recent shows:

Joy Episalla

Tony Gray

Dominic McGill

Carrie Yamaoka



We are open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. We will be closed from mid-July until Labor Day. In addition, we will be closed Saturdays in July.



For information on other artists and previous exhibitions, poke around our archives (flash required).



Here's a panoramic (and horridly montaged) view of our booth at Arco 2003, Madrid. (Work by Dominic McGill, Joy Episalla, and Rina Banerjee).



Please drop us an email with any questions.

Check it out:



Sandow Birk's second Dante series on view at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.



We still have Amy Jean Porter drawings available at the gallery; read about them in New York magazine.



We're pleased to announce the inclusion of Emily Jacir in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Also, a new review of her work in The Washington Post.



Now available at the gallery: J'aime la Nature: A Blueprint for Asymetric Threats in Rhyme, a full color 'zine in a signed and numbered edition of 30, with text by Chris Habib and images by Libby McInnis. Comes with your choice of hand-printed t-shirt or tote bag! $60.00, come and get it.



Hilarious interview with Stefanie Nagorka, Home Depot sculptor, on NPR's All Things Considered.



Sandow Birk's Dante's Inferno is available for viewing on request. The gorgeous book is in an edition of 100. More information over at Trillium Press.



Until July 27th, you can see Nina Katchadourian's spider video Gift/Gift at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.



In the June 2003 Art in America, great review of Nina Katchadourian's most recent show here -- a "suberb...presentation [...] a ridiculously fun experiment."



Emily Jacir in Rainer Ganahl's private/public, through June 27th, in Munich at Häusler Contemporary, in Made in Palestine at the Art Car Museum in Houston, and here in New York in Homeland, the Whitney ISP's exhibition at the CUNY Graduate Center.



Many of the reviews are in: read about our most recent exhibition by Emily Jacir: "One of the most moving gallery exhibitions I've encountered this season." -- Holland Cotter, New York Times

JOY GARNETT
RIOT
JANUARY 15TH - FEBRUARY 21ST, 2004





Debs & Co. is pleased to present Riot, a series of new paintings by Joy Garnett. Riot will be Ms. Garnett's third solo exhibition at Debs & Co.

These new paintings in Riot depict people in emotional distress, the figure in extremity. As in much of Ms. Garnett's previous work, the causes behind the explosive action are generally political in nature. The immediate sources for these acts and images are often taken from newspapers and other media. Her re-casting of these visuals plays with the history of history painting itself.

In Molotov, the artist has painted a monumental figure of a long haired youth in a black beret throwing a freshly lit molotov cocktail. The heroically-proportioned figure twists off the frame of the painting, his home-made bomb front and center, the recognizable logo of the cola bottle smeared into a not-so-funny red, white and blue, while his face is contorted into a sneer of pure hatred. Whatever background existed in the original image has been reduced to the blank grayish blue of smoke. The figure, in his moment of action, is removed from his surroundings; the context, cause, time and place, or justice of his actions are irrelevant and not portrayed. What is important to the painter is the extremity of the figure's emotions, not whether they are right or wrong.

In Air Strip, Ms. Garnett portrays a man and woman in a deep embrace. The familiar looking couple stand in the center of the large horizontal canvas, their stance uncomfortably intimate and awkward. In this painting, the background, while abstracted, is recognizable as a desert air field, and the nose-cones behind the man's shoulder and his own Air Force fighter pilot uniform signal that this is a farewell taken from our current war. Nevertheless, Ms. Garnett depicts the two in a twister of baroque impasto which renders whatever political meaning originally intended for the image utterly banal, or even camp. The point here is passion, and the experience of it.

The notion of heightened emotion removed from cause is particularly evident in paintings such as Jump and Leap, in which young men jump through the fires lit during World Trade Organization protests. The riot is here exterior and interior: the young men risk life and limb for no particular purpose, other than the thrill of it. The ecstasy experienced has no real connection with the original intention of the protests; these boys have shown up after the fact to play with fire for the sake of playing with fire.

Ms. Garnett will exhibit concurrently at the Puffin Foundation in Teaneck, NJ, in an exhibition called Shocked and Awed. The artist has recently appeared in Americana at SVA, curated by Anne Ellegood and Rachel Gugelberger and in The UFO Show at Illinois State University Galleries; in 2004 she will appear in Atomica at the Neues Kunstmuseum Luzern, Paradise Lost at Van Brunt Gallery, For Real: War and the Contemporary Audience at Stony Brook University, and at other venues including the National Academy of Sciences and the Maxwell Art Gallery (UK).

Ms. Garnett had her first solo exhibition at Debs & Co. in 1999 and her second in 2001. In 2002, she was the curator of Night Vision, a travelling exhibition which was shown at White Columns here in New York. She received her MFA from the City College of New York in 1991 and studied in Paris at L'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1985 to 1987. She lives and works in New York City.