Brett De Palma, RM Fischer and Judy Glantzman
Brett De Palma, RM Fischer and Judy Glantzman
Livingston Manor, NY — Catskill Art Space (CAS) is pleased to present a three-person exhibition featuring Brett De Palma, RM Fischer, and Judy Glantzman, on view September 5 through October 24, 2026. The exhibition opens with an Artist Talk on Saturday, September 5 from 3–4pm in the River Gallery, followed by a reception from 4–5pm in the Main Street-facing galleries. Working across sculpture, painting, and works on paper, the exhibition brings together three artists whose practices span decades of making — rooted in process, material discovery, and an abiding belief in the expressive and revelatory power of art.
RM Fischer returns to early works stored in an art storage shed on his Catskill Mountain property — photographic deconstructions from the early 1970s that laid the groundwork for the lamp sculptures and public art for which he is widely known. Beginning with images drawn from popular culture, sociology textbooks, and travel brochures, Fischer constructed objects that responded to and transformed their source material, a process that remains at the core of his practice.
Judy Glantzman approaches painting as a playground, her canvases populated by invented characters treated with utmost sincerity. For Glantzman, paint becomes radiant and remains an object simultaneously — the dichotomy between illusion and materiality beating at the heart of her practice. In 2005 these paintings were finished; twenty years later, she has returned to them, reworking each canvas in a return to the playground of a younger self. Her paintings are accompanied by ceramic works that explore subjects of a similar nature, each at once undone and luminously resolved.
Brett De Palma constructs sardonic, psychedelic visual puzzles that resist easy resolution, embracing the raw, the funky, and the deliberately impure as tools for truth-telling. His compositions hold contradictory elements in productive tension — hard edges and soft forms, humor and darkness, sensuality and roughness — standing in for real life in all its quirkiness. Together, the three artists share a commitment to discovery over certainty, to standing before the work and finding out what it wants to be.
About the Artists
RM Fischer (b. 1947, New York, NY) is a sculptor whose practice spans assemblage, public art, and works on paper. Known in the 1980s and 1990s for creating lamp sculptures from wholesale kitchen equipment and various fasteners, Fischer's work evolved from an early practice of deconstructing photographic images drawn from popular culture His renowned public art works appear in cities across the United States and Japan. His work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Tamayo Museo Cultural Center for Contemporary Art, Mexico City.
Judy Glantzman has lived and worked in New York City since 1978, and moved to Chatham, NY in 2022. A member of the East Village art scene in the early and mid-1980s, she was represented by Civilian Warfare Gallery and Gracie Mansion Gallery, and is currently represented by Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York. Glantzman is a National Academician at the National Academy of Design and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts award.
Brett De Palma is a painter and educator based in Nyack and Roscoe, New York. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award (1988) and Rockland County Executive Visual Artist of the Year (2013), De Palma has exhibited nationally and internationally, with work held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Permanent Collection of the Hotel Chelsea, the Eli Broad Family Foundation, among others. His work has been written about in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and Flash Art. He has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York City, for thirty-five years.
Long-term Installations
Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell’s Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building’s second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist’s early, wall-based “aperture” works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a “viewing space,” where one stands to see and experience the work, and a “sensing space,” which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell’s aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.
On the second floor’s central landing, Sol LeWitt’s vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell’s Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS’s space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist’s estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determines the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.
The newly realized performance space on CAS’s second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape’s A Gathering of Utopian Benches—an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape’s installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape’s studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.
Ellen Brooks activates an intimate gallery space, framed by a partially open staircase, with Hang (2022), an installation suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.
About Catskill Art Space
Catskill Art Space (CAS) explores contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists. Through exhibitions, performances, classes, lectures, and screenings, CAS fosters creative community in the Catskills.
Established as Catskill Art Society in 1971, CAS reopened in October 2022 as Catskill Art Space following a major renovation and expansion of its multi-arts center, located in the picturesque hamlet of Livingston Manor in the Western Catskills. CAS presents a rotating slate of exhibitions, performances and other events featuring national and regional talents, alongside long-term installations of works by James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Francis Cape, and Ellen Brooks. Learn more at catskillartspace.org.
Notes to Editor
Opening date: September 5, 2026
Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, September 5. Artists talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm
Exhibition on-view: September 5 – October 24, 2026
Long-term installations on view: Long-term presentation (through 2027) of James Turrell’s light installation Avaar (1982) and two site-specific wall drawings from Sol LeWitt, as well as solo presentations of well-established artists from the local area, Francis Cape (through 2027) and Ellen Brooks (through 2027).
Instagram: @catskillartspace
For media inquiries, please contact:
Sally Wright, Executive Director
646-696-1044
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