Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Au bord de l’eau, the gallery’s first group exhibition, bringing together eight new works by three iconic New York–based painters: Rita Ackermann (b. 1968, Budapest), Jamian Juliano-Villani (b. 1987, Newark, New Jersey), and Emily Sundblad (b. 1977, Stockholm). They represent three generations of women artists who have made a strong mark on the New York art world. Ackermann emerged in the mid-1990s, Sundblad came on the scene in the mid-2000s, and Juliano-Villani arrived in the late 2010s. All three are exhibiting in Nice for the first time.

Au bord de l’eau is inspired by two cities fundamentally marked by their proximity to water—New York and Nice—one abutting the Atlantic Ocean, the other on the Mediterranean Sea. The works reflect on marine life, shorelines and beaches, waves and winds, and humanity’s fascination and identification with the sea.

Rita Ackermann presents three new paintings that depict sailboats wrestling with the ocean and the wind during a wild storm. One shows three boats at night; against a dark blue background, we only see white sails and a bright moon looming in the distance. The other two paintings are bursting with color: bright red, vivid orange, intense yellow, light blue. All three have an intensely energetic quality—dazzling colors and dense layers of oil paint, applied in a powerful, gestural style that borders on abstraction.

Emily Sundblad’s three works invite the viewer to an adventure in her phantasmagorical world, both above and beneath the sea. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (2022) brings us from Venetian canals to a place miles underwater populated by seahorses, jellyfish, giant octopuses, and spiky blowfishes. An enormous swordfish is leading the way to the lost underwater city of Atlantis. Somewhere in the distance, a white whale and a mermaid hide behind seagrass.

The two works by Jamian Juliano-Villani move away from the other intensely romantic, passionate, and dreamy paintings in the exhibition. Based on images found online, they are more prosaic and approach the theme of exhibition in a manner characteristic of the artist. Brash and expansive, they deliver visual punches that explore the conflicted history and iconography of US popular culture with irony, absurdity, and dark humor. Tommy Is Raft (2022) depicts a boy on an inflatable water mattress floating happily on the water on a sunny summer day. The original image was part of a late-1990s advertisement for the Kodak Disc camera. At the top left we see the old logo of the company, which clearly dates the image. The second painting, A Lobster About to Die (2022), depicts a hand holding a lobster, apparently ready to drop the crustacean mercilessly into a pot of boiling water.

A publication will accompany the exhibition.