Hudson Franklin is pleased to present A Loaf of Bread, a Carton of Milk, and a Stick of Butter, a group exhibition featuring the paintings of Anna Bjerger, Munro Galloway, Mairead O'hEocha, Anders Oinonen, and Allison Schulnik.

This exhibition includes paintings that rely on the relationship between representation and the basic material ingredients of the medium. The artists who create these works are not preoccupied with challenging conventional painting materials. They focus their efforts primarily on the familiar: paint, medium, canvas texture, and the variety of manipulations possible with these. Nor are these artists highly interested in relying on illusion to coax us beyond material reality. They can all be referred to as representational painters but use only enough representational cues to indicate a point of reference or departure. The innovation of these artists lies in their ability to uncover meaning through their use of paint and to generate significant experiences that depend on our hovering between representation and material, between the what and the how, between otherness and presence, between icon and index, or between any number of related tensions.

In his book Painting as Model, Yve-Alain Bois envisions "the possibility of a materialist formalism, for which the specificity of the object involves not just the general condition of its medium, but also its means of production in the slightest detail." Bois's examination of material and process is expansive and in this sense applies to the work in A Loaf of Bread, a Carton of Milk, and a Stick of Butter. As these artists deal with the deceptively expansive interplay of representation and traditional painting ingredients, they unlock deep experiential potential for viewers.