Waterfall Mansion & Gallery, New York, NY | 1 April - 30 June 2023

Six of Michael's new oil paintings will be included in the floral-themed exhibition, A Blooming Resilience, at Waterfall Gallery in New York's Upper East Side.

This is the first time examples from Michael's new oil painting series will be exhibited publicly. (All six paintings will be shared on this page after the exhibition opens.)

In addition to Michael, the exhbition includes works by Myung Bo-Sim, Seongmin Ahn, Hye Rim Lee, and Heidy Sumei Chuang

A Blooming Resilience

April 1 through June 30, 2023

Note: the exhibition has been extended to June 30

Opening reception: April 1 from 11:00 am until 6:00 pm

Michael will be in attendance from 3:00 pm until 6:00 pm

Waterfall Gallery

170 East 80th Street

New York, NY 10075

For complete details please visit: www.waterfall-gallery.com

The resilience of nature has long been a source of inspiration for artists, from Ancient Egypt to contemporary art. In particular, flowers have remained an important symbolic subject for artists to convey social ideals, cultural values, personal emotions, and visions.

A Blooming Resilience is a collection of 5 international contemporary artists who create with the lens of resilience through delicate details and bold palettes inspired by the language of flowers. With these works, we are reminded of the tenacious characteristics of sheer beauty– adaptability, perseverance, and reciprocity that enable both nature and humanity to withstand adversity and continue to flourish.

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Artist Michael De Feo works in phases making distinct bodies of work over periods of time. His new and current series is a transition to painting on canvas. Utilizing acyclic, oil, and oil stick, the paintings are joyous and exuberant, their surfaces crackling with energy. These new paintings showcase De Feo’s push toward a more gestural abstraction while still referencing his long-held interest in flowers and beauty in the ephemeral.

Like his celebrated series of paintings on top of large, printed fashion campaigns, these works on canvas are executed with multiple layers of paint, each one intervening or “taking-over” the previous state partially or completely. This painting-over process is both a form of erasure and regrowth. De Feo’s lively and sometimes spontaneous application of materials echoes some of art history’s most influential painters and references aspects of Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, and Pierre Bonnard brought together with the immediacy of graffiti. An inventive colorist, De Feo’s palette pops. The sides of his canvases feature the frequently bright drips of acrylic paint. These marks reveal his first steps in the process of building the paintings, which the artist applies while the work is lying flat on the floor of the studio.

Michael De Feo is an American artist living and working in New York City. At the forefront of the early 1990s street art movement in New York City, Michael spray-painted and wheat-pasted his playful flowers in cities around the world for 30 years, cementing his status as “The Flower Guy”. Embracing flowers as the main interest of his studio practice, Michael has continuously developed various bodies of work that explore themes of ephemerality, regrowth, and the cycle of life. De Feo’s most recent series of paintings are executed in acrylic, oil and oil stick on canvas and showcase his push toward a more gestural abstraction while reflecting the spontaneity, whimsy, and immediacy of his street art.