Frida's Show presents: Coffee Without Cream

Coffee Without Cream
September 10th - October 15th, 2026
Opening reception, Thursday, Sep 10, 6-9 pm

Frida's Show
247 West 29th Street
New York City

Michael Brennan
Lukas Geronimas Giniotis
Julia Goldman
Essye Klempner
Paul Kopkau
Gary Stephan

Curated by Eric Legris & Roger Danilo Carmona

How is it possible for a missing object to have an indisputable presence?  All art embodies this question but the artists in this show ride the peculiar edge between the something and the nothing. 

When does an absence become a presence?  One way this happens is when something important is palpably not present.  Another word for this is negation. 

Example: You are meeting your mother at the park & you are running late & you arrive & she is not there.  

The absent mother at the park is the theme of this show. 

Negation is a deeply philosophical term that can be difficult to wrap your head around.  It is helpful to think of creation and destruction as both equally acts of negation.  When your mother is not in the park the result is the creation of a totally new reality.  The absence is generative.  The negation is artistic.  

For Plato, our ability to reason emerges from negation within a conversation.  Reason emerges when one argument compels its negation in the form of a counter-argument.  This is the power of the word Not. 

Artists:

Paul Kopkau ~ offers some divinely elegant alienation reminiscent of Constantin Brâncuși.  There is a dressmaker’s-mock-up aesthetic to these sculptural objects imbued with a working-class chic.  

Michael Brennan ~ mixes crushed glass with a gel medium, lots of solvents, and only the grittiest of mineral pigments to be painted with a palette knife.  Every knife mark that is made, at the same time, obliterates what was there before.  These contemplative marks and these chosen limitations …

Gary Stephan ~ is a painter’s painter who has found a way to reach beyond utility and judgement.  His wobbly approach to a tight compositional idea creates an empty center sprouted from a lot of painting evident along the edges in the paintings here. 

Julia Goldman ~ paints a mug handle that looks out at you in a way that asks to be grasped.    She invents doubled door handles from cars she sees walking to her painting studio.  There is a gentle touch of desire within these welcoming incidentals. 

Lukas Geronimas Giniotis ~ Like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, the enjoyment of mystery is the not knowing.  The height of consideration for materials and layered forms make the paintings very sculptural and also full of boundaries.  If reading all of this has made you tired, then downstairs you can find an evitrinado stool that you can’t sit on.

Essye Klempner ~ like a human camera, Essye marked a time and a place (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 2022) with ceramics made with clay from the onsite soil, the same clay that was then pressed into rocks and grass and other related forms on the ground and then fired onsite.  

To conclude with a philosophical joke: 

"A man comes into a restaurant. He sits down at the table and he says, 'Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without cream.' Five minutes later, the waiter comes back and says, 'I'm sorry, sir. We have no cream. Can it be without milk?'"