old friends is an art gallery located in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, IL. The gallery presents practices with increased focus on material application, supporting critical conversation through archival and communal programming.
old friends was founded by Fawn Penn and Delia Pelli-Walbert in 2024. For inquiries, please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com
The entrance is two steps below street level, off of Halsted, north of the intersection of Briar and Halsted. The main doorway is 37-1/2 inches wide; an accessible entrance is available as needed. The gallery is located off the Belmont Red and Brown line train stops and the Halsted bus line. If you need physical assistance or a virtual viewing of any of our exhibitions, please contact us at the email above.
Image: Installation view of E. Saffronia Downing: Tracks and Other Signs at Old Friends
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Martyna Alexander’s dreamlike topography emerges through washes of acrylic, overlaid with marks suggestive of an unknowable order. Andrew Hayes’ formalistic sculpture pairs paper and steel, the two substances alchemized, mirroring one another in fluid motion. Both artists speak spatially, their works boundless, sensual, and sensory.
Alexander paints landscapes as if seen through a haze, in pigmented stains that seep and sink into the canvas weft. She allows space to remain perceptual and indistinct, intentionally obscuring any discernible landmark. Floating through the composition are hallucinatory gestures, in graphite or soft pastel, pulled from the artist's own lexicon of organization. Red Flag radiates with desert heat, each cell in the superimposed graphite grid blazed with a single red mark. There is no containing Alexander’s landscapes; their atmosphere seeps into the room. Like a mirage, they shimmer into and out of being.
Hayes marries disparate materials; beginning with old, mass-printed books, he bends, contorts, and slices the pages, then anchors these compositions between subtly carved metal structures. Steel glints, not coldly, but with a seductive, supple quality. Though the paper retains certain literary visual identifiers (marbled edges, tabs, the ghost of text), Hayes anonymizes all content - he responds solely to its material potential. Hayes’ sculptures are precisely choreographed; undulating metal giving way to splayed pages, frozen at the apex of movement.
Both artists allude to narrative, a suggestive presence of space or story, yet intentionally conceal definition. Their works speak to a symbolic dimension, a space where reference dissolves into abstraction. The sensory impression remains - a metallic taste, the scent of wet grass, an auric residue.
or, The River will be on view at old friends, 3149 N. Halsted St., Chicago, IL, from September 12th through November 14th. Gallery staff are available to guide viewers through the exhibition via Zoom upon request. Please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com with any questions or inquiries.
Pictured: ANDREW HAYES
Aureate Inclusion, 2025
Fabricated steel and book paper
17 x 10 x 2-1/2 inches
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Luis González Palma highlights erasure and wear in both subject and material approach. Embracing highly tactile photo techniques, the artist manipulates static images with painterly motion, using bitumen and asphaltum to emphasize the subject’s arresting gaze. Working in transparency over gold leaf, González Palma captures evidence of his process - remnants of handling marks, scratches, cuts, and folds are recorded in the gold ground. The visible action of each piece unfolds into the suggestive dimension of memory.
In early portraiture, González Palma interrogates the weaponized distinction of “mestizo,” individuals of Mayan and Indigenous descent who face discrimination and dissociation from their ancestry. The subjects of absence and memory continue as prescient themes in González Palma’s work as he identifies idiosyncratic qualities of personal identity excluded from the political and religious hegemonies that form his environment.
The Bodyguard series features nine goldtone portraits expressing nuances of individuality at an intimate scale. His subjects wear dramatic ruff collars, reminiscent of 16th- and 17th century class symbols, their characteristics unified under the costume of colonial authority. González Palma places these portraits in unique vintage daguerreotype and ambrotype cases, originally designed to fit in a pocket and be carried close to the body. Each intricately crafted case holds a single figure, shielded between the covers.
Luis González Palma was born in Guatemala and lives in Cordoba, Argentina. He has held exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, USA; The Australian Centre for Photography, Australia; Palacio de Bellas Artes de México; The Royal Festival Hall in London; Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Italia; MACRO and Castagnino Museums, Rosario, Argentina; Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, and Santiago de Compostela, España, among others. He has been included in expositions internationally, including at Les Rencontres de Arles, France, the 49th and 51st Venice Biennials, Italy, Fotobeinal de Vigo, Spain, XXII Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the V Biennial in Havana, Cuba. González Palma’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Daros Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, La Maison Europeénne de la Photographie in Paris, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts in USA, la Foundation pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, France, the Fondazione Volume! in Roma, Italia; the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogotá, Colombia; The Fogg Museum in Harvard University, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA; the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.
This exhibition is presented with generous support from Verge Frames and Schneider Gallery.
Image: Bodyguard Series, Platinum/Palladium on Japanese gampi tissue paper, 17 x 21 inches, sheet: 21 x 28-1/2 inches
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The Cranbrook Academy of Art x SAIC Ceramics Department partnership was founded in the Fall of 2015 by SAIC alumni Katie Doyle and Cranbrook alumni Ebitenyefa Baralaye and has occurred annually (with a brief interruption during the COVID pandemic). This ongoing collaboration fosters cross-institutional dialogue around shared material engagements and presents an opportunity to lay groundwork for sustained connections across the greater midwestern region.
Image: Autumn Horwath
Hand to Hand, 2025
Ceramic stoneware
32 x 24 x 10 inches
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Please join us for a closing reception and artists’ panel on April 11th, 6-9pm, featuring a conversation with artists Ava Carney, Matthew Kaufman, and Myiesha Gordon Beales on collaboration and curation in ceramics.
The Cranbrook Academy of Art x SAIC Ceramics Department partnership was founded in the Fall of 2015 by SAIC alumni Katie Doyle and Cranbrook alumni Ebitenyefa Baralaye and has occurred annually (with a brief interruption during the COVID pandemic). This ongoing collaboration fosters cross-institutional dialogue around shared material engagements and presents an opportunity to lay groundwork for sustained connections across the greater midwestern region.
Image: TIMOTHY FOX
Risk, 2025
Ceramic
18 x 7-1/2 x 6 inches (together)
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Pictured: Untitled (Bronze Chair), 2024, Cast bronze, 35 x 14-1/2 x 15 inches
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Alexander probes sensory memories, encountering within them aqueous, lush landscapes. She forms an indistinct geography from gentle, earthen-toned brushstrokes. In this space, figures blur and bleed; luminous green rambles into steely mountains. The scenes manifest as impressions of place, substantially intangible.
Superimposed on the bucolic ground, Alexander places suggestively organizational pictographic marks. Chromatic framing devices, court lines, and wingdings hover on an invisible film. These forms appear solid, rising above the vaporous landscape. The underlying scene shifts and melts.
In The Intimate Time Among Hills (2025), a looming red-earth hill bleeds into foggy sky, solid, not still. The tonal washes at times interrupt Alexander’s graphic overlay. Graphite court lines in The Application of a Semi-Rigid System (2025) sink into a deep field, the field itself bleeds into atmosphere. Nothing is static; each gesture on the brink of fluctuating, fading, or floating away.
Alexander thinks of utopias as she paints. Her compositions are intimate viewfinders into conjured worlds, accessed through an intuitive inner vision. She gazes towards these promised vistas, their phenomena veiled in glowing hues.
The Distant Now will be on view at old friends, 3405 N. Paulina St., Chicago, IL, June 21st through August 2nd. The gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 12-6 pm, and by appointment. Please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com with questions or inquiries.
Pictured: Tending to Inherited Memory, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 8 x 12
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On view August 14 - September 21, 2025. Curated by Bianca Bova.
Following Chicken Stingel, a performance and exhibition at the Connelly Family Project Space in London in May 2025, Old Friends presents Kenny’s Schachter’s Chicken Stingel: The Sequel.
The jumping off point for Chicken Stingel is a series of Rudolf Stingel works begun in 2002, utilizing large-scale panels of Celotex Tuff-R insulation. The panels were affixed to gallery and museum walls where viewers were encouraged to graffiti them via scratching, writing, or otherwise leaving marks on the malleable surfaces. A decade later the artist readdressed the brittle pieces by casting them in electroformed copper plated in nickel and gold, preserving for posterity an archive of the public’s interactions.
Schachter engages Stingel’s process, exchanging chickens for the public as his collaborators. For the production of the works, a group of micro-sized canvases are coated in edible adhesive, covered in feed, and placed on a wooden workspace structure Schachter has constructed within the participating chickens’ coop. The works that result from the hens’ consumption of the feed from the surfaces of the canvases are then digitally scanned, cast, and coated in silver and gold finishes.
Chicken Stingel: The Sequel encompasses an exhibition of the cast works from the initial performance by Maura and Margaret (London), and will include the initiation of a second series of works with a performance by Jiji and Henrietta (Chicago). By bringing this work to completion in the American heartland, Schachter (who is himself not a stranger to farm life, having worked on one managing its chicken enclosure after graduating from high school early) brings into consideration the multifaceted nature of the animal. They are foodstuffs, undeniably, but also themselves the producers of foodstuffs; companionable collaborators; an intrinsic part of the Midwestern landscape integral to its identity and inhabitability.
— Bianca Bova
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Curated by Bianca Bova
On view August 14 - September 21
Old Friends will host a conversation between Kenny Schachter and Bianca Bova on September 17th at 6pm, with a reception to follow. The event is free and open to the public; no RSVP necessary.
Following Chicken Stingel, a performance and exhibition at the Connelly Family Project Space in London in May 2025, Old Friends presents Kenny Schachter’s Chicken Stingel: The Sequel.
The jumping off point for Chicken Stingel is a series of Rudolf Stingel works begun in 2002, utilizing large-scale panels of Celotex Tuff-R insulation. The panels were affixed to gallery and museum walls where viewers were encouraged to graffiti them via scratching, writing, or otherwise leaving marks on the malleable surfaces. A decade later the artist readdressed the brittle pieces by casting them in electroformed copper plated in nickel and gold, preserving for posterity an archive of the public’s interactions.
Schachter engages Stingel’s process, exchanging chickens for the public as his collaborators. For the production of the works, a group of micro-sized canvases are coated in edible adhesive, covered in feed, and placed on a wooden workspace structure Schachter has constructed within the participating chickens’ coop. The works that result from the hens’ consumption of the feed from the surfaces of the canvases are then digitally scanned, cast, and coated in silver and gold finishes.
Chicken Stingel: The Sequel encompasses an exhibition of the cast works from the initial performance by Maura and Margaret (London), and will include the initiation of a second series of works with a performance by Jiji and Henrietta (Chicago). By bringing this work to completion in the American heartland, Schachter (who is himself not a stranger to farm life, having worked on one managing its chicken enclosure after graduating from high school early) brings into consideration the multifaceted nature of the animal. They are foodstuffs, undeniably, but also themselves the producers of foodstuffs; companionable collaborators; an intrinsic part of the Midwestern landscape integral to its identity and inhabitability.
— Bianca Bova
Chicken Stingel: The Sequel will be on view at Old Friends August 14th through September 21st. The gallery is located at 3405 N. Paulina St. Chicago, IL, 60657, and is open Thursday through Saturday, 12-6pm, or by appointment. Please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com with questions and inquiries.
pictured:
Untitled (Chicken Stingel: Casts), 2025
Electroformed copper, plated nickel and gold. Unique.
4 x 4 inches
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Signal/Noise was originally conceived as a series of color photograms on analog film created between 2023 and 2025. Using gridded materials and brief exposures to color-filtered light, Fogelson works in darkness, combining elements by feel and chance. In collaboration with video editor Matt Volla, the artist then translates the photograms into moving images—crossfading, shifting saturation, cropping, and fragmenting forms.
Jeffrey Lubow is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher, and artist concerned with the space between the body and emergent technology. In response to Fogelson’s video piece, Lubow designed software that translates the photograms’ visual edge patterns and color weights into sound, effectively facilitating the imagery to “play itself.”
Please join us on Zoom on Saturday, December 14th, 4pm CST for a discussion on collaborative relationships between artists and between technologies. The conversation will be recorded and available on oldfriendsgallery.com.
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Old Friends is pleased to present ReCentering, a secondary iteration of our inaugural Centering exhibition. Same artists, new works, same ethos of returning to purpose, place, and practice. Ava Igoe, Michelle Chun, Tong Pan, and Emily Schroeder Willis.
As M. C. Richards writes in her seminal 1964 text: “An act of the self, that’s what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center.”
Join us in celebrating the exhibition at a closing reception on Friday, August 21st. 3149 N. Halsted, 6-9 pm.