Fredericks & Freiser

About the Gallery
Fredericks & Freiser (est. 1996) is committed to showcasing emerging artists as well as recontextualizing artists of earlier generations. Fostering a continuum between past and present, the gallery’s curatorial program maintains a long history of focusing on artists who have made important contributions to the development of 20th and 21st century art.

About the Presentation
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present a juxtaposition of new works by Sam Mattax and Anna Kenneally. Though divergent in their visual languages—Mattax’s raw abstraction and Kenneally’s dark, figurative explorations—both artists grapple with what remains inscrutable in human experience.

Sam Mattax (b. 1995. Lives and works in Brooklyn) constructs large-scale abstractions that layer paint, line, and bare canvas into a sculptural interplay of presence and absence. His surfaces, by turns open and dense, resist easy gratification, embracing moments of opacity that evoke emotional complexity and interior states beyond words.

Anna Kenneally (b. 1995. Lives and works in London), in contrast, channels a contemporary, shadowed Impressionism through haunting depictions of figures suspended in fragmented, uncertain spaces. Her women, both commanding and unknowable, emerge as avatars of contemporary unrest, navigating decaying landscapes and fractured human relationships.

Together, Mattax and Kenneally explore the tension between clarity and obscurity, form and dissolution, grounding their works in an insistence on emotional resonance while leaving much unresolved. This shared refusal to fully illuminate their subjects invites viewers to dwell in the enigmatic and mutable terrain of contemporary painting.