HANNA ESHEL (b. 1926) is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for her work in carved marble—a skill she honed from 1972-1978 while living and practicing in Carrara, Italy—as well as her dimensional burlap paintings. In 1978, Eshel relocated to New York City with 20,000 pounds of sculpture. For the more than twenty years she continued to create works in her NoHo loft before moving to the Bronx in 2015. After more than 25 years, Patrick Parrish was one of three galleries to dedicate exhibitions to the works of Hanna Eshel.
If asked to select one word to describe Patrick, I would resist and pick two. The first would be curiosity — a fundamental essential, to stimulate inquiry and rigour in all things, both great and small, of any era or region, type or surface. Even the most fleeting survey of this selection for sale is a celebration of innovation and of inspiration — an unerring eye for the unusually exceptional, or perhaps the exceptionally unusual. The chances are, that these are indeed discoveries that you have not yet realised that you needed to make.
Mentor, would be my second word. If artefacts and objects articulate visual, cultural and historic language, then the fluency of skillful mentorship — to guide, nurture, describe and explain — releases the eloquence of murmuring histories. In this capacity Patrick is that most earnest and sincere of excellent narrators. If ever I had friends, clients or colleagues visiting New York looking for unusual inspiration, there was always the certainty that Patrick’s venues would offer them a glimpse of the hitherto unseen or the unusually seductive, always with the reassurance of the most fascinating story waiting to be told.
Mentorship and curiosity, when balanced in equal measure, reveal the precious alchemy of a curator. And it is the duty of the mature curator to discern and detect, to cultivate change, and from there to pioneer, and to share. Innovation is never static, and the Present is already the Future. Fresh dialogs evolve, energies to be nurtured, opportunities to be guided. Renewed and re-orientated, Patrick’s decision to exchange his bricks-and-mortar Tribeca gallery for a new interactive Brooklyn space aligns him towards a new inquisitive future as supportive benefactor, interlocutor and mentor to a fresh yield of talented creators — those established and those rising — and the quest for discovery rejuvenates.
— Simon Andrews
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