The First Street Gallery announces an exhibition of new work by Penny Kronengold which will open on Tuesday, March 27 and continue through Saturday, April 21.

In this exhibition Kronengold returns to the figure of the horse. Her interest was renewed after coming upon the glass-encased horses and figures of the Hindu Gate, an unusual installation of 17th- and 19th- century Indian sculptures in the Museum of Natural History. The Central Park carousel and the armored horses in the Metropolitan Museum struck a similar chord. Many months of drawing preceded the paintings. Writing in The New York Sun and artcritical.com, David Cohen has noted that Kronengold’s “formal concerns amount to an almost alchemical duality of solid and transparent, mass, and fluidity. She draws extensively from life … then improvises with abandon at the easel. The result is an animated dialogue, at times, actually, a collision of intense drawing and ecstatic color." While the new paintings retain the earlier work's emphasis on gesture and immediacy, their compressed spaces present special formal and affective challenges. On an intimate scale that places weight on every mark, horses become metaphors for personal and social struggle.

Kronengold’s past exhibitions have been reviewed by Jed Perl in The New Republic, David Cohen  in The New York Sun and articritical.com, and William Zimmer in The New York Times. Her public collectors include the Collection of the Library of Congress, Mobil Oil, MCI Telecommunications and the Printmaking Workshop. In addition to many previous solo shows at the First Street Gallery, BOOKS and CO., The Richard Stockton College Art Gallery and elsewhere, She has exhibited at the Albright-Knox Members Gallery, the Trenton City Museum, and The Sculpture Center. She participated in the 2005 New York Studio Benefit Auction. Work by the artist is reproduced in Tikkun and American Craft.

Photographs are available upon request. Reviews, biographical information and images of the artist’s work can be seen at: Artincontext