Five Painters

Five Painters 
April 17 - May 24, 2025

Opening reception: Thursday, April 17  from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is happy to announce Five Painters, a group exhibition with John Brooks, Canyon Castator, Kenwyn Crichlow, Pam Posey, and Vanessa Prager. The exhibition will present new work by artists who explore personal narratives through a range of formal practice from landscape painting and gestural abstraction to figurative portraiture and comic-fantasy tableaux. Five Painters coincides with the thirteenth anniversary of Diane Rosenstein Gallery. 

John Brooks (USA, b. 1978) is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Brooks’ expressionistic paintings often depict his friends, as well as figures and sites sourced from historic and found photographs. He combines images “to create what I think of as the hint of a new narrative.” He will show a recent suite of portraits and tableaux, some with a circus or theatrical setting, that are “charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness.” John Brooks received a solo exhibition, if the Lovers are Losers, at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Winston-Salem (2024).  

Canyon Castator (USA, b. 1989) employs a maximalist comic-fantasy visual language to balance digital and traditional painting techniques on the canvas. Castator will present Cannon Fodder – a series of five large-scale paintings that use satire to address our social reality, bringing together an exuberant blend of figures culled from the internet, modern media, politics and personal experience. "This body of work is an attempt to...lay bare the ways mass media uses spectacle to instill foundational ideas about power, virtue, and violence, particularly in the imagination of young men.” Castator lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Kenwyn Crichlow (Trinidad and Tobago, b. 1951) is a painter, arts leader, and educator with a studio practice in Curepe, Trinidad. He will show Radiance, a monumental gestural, abstract triptych influenced by Trinidad's topographic and cultural Caribbean landscape. Crichlow received a solo exhibition Incandescence, with our gallery in 2023, and his paintings were recently included in Infinite Regress, curated by Kevin Moore, at The Kemper Museum of Art (2024) in Kansas City and Keeping Time, curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn, at Gallery 1957, in Accra, Ghana (2024). 

Pam Posey (USA, b 1950) examines the natural world and how it can be represented through painting. Working from a studio in West Los Angeles, Posey reimagines landscapes by mapping the experience of being in nature while she paints.  For her first exhibition with our gallery, Posey will show a series of recent landscape paintings, many on an intimate, small scale. “Landscape painting is a way of constructing boundaries on the boundless. Its impossibility is what compels, what gives it the state of unknowing, what makes it a never-ending endeavor. “

Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984) is a Los Angeles-based artist who is known for an elaborate impasto painting technique that creates thickly layered and sculptural surfaces. Since 2021, she has presented two solo shows with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. In a trio of new paintings, Prager places characters “within storybook narratives, drawing inspiration from the heroic yet often tragic women of mythology and literature. These recurring figures, at times accompanied by children, intertwine to reflect the comedy and tragedy of modern life.” 

There is an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, April 17 from 6pm - 8pm.