Contrasting Methods Activate Contessa Gallery’s Art Southampton Presentation

Prominently featured are works by Hanneke Beaumont, Jasper Johns, and Thomas Scoon, all of which share a somber, thoughtful aura as well as a limited palette of greens, golds, and browns. Scoon’s sculptures in cast glass and granite, while objectively abstract, are referred to by the artist as “figures,” an appropriate designation when viewed alongside the bronze characters cast by Beaumont. While clearly approaching the subject matter of the human form from different angles, the works share an emotional reverberation achieved through subtle manipulations in posture and compositional balance. Similarly, Johns’s print evokes an introspective state through experiments in rhythm and formal harmony, in one of the many iterations of his canonical “0-9” series begun in the 1960s.

The remaining pieces on view, by Mr. Brainwash, David Datuna, David Drebin and Gilles Cenazandotti, are loud and raucous—but simultaneously complex. While none of these artists is American-born, each has appropriated the imagery and material of the culture in humorous, sometimes flagrant reimaginings of the everyday.

Masterfully self-aware, Mr. Brainwash and Drebin remix the languages of ubiquitous contemporary imagery. Mr. Brainwash continues the mashups of street art, high art, and Pop he was made famous for in the Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop, while Drebin takes the noirish photographic style and melodramatic copy popular in fashion imagery to extreme levels in his digital prints and neons.