Defying categorical restraint, Kyle Dunn (b. 1990) combines sculptural and painterly traditions, including bas-relief and trompe l'oeil, to create deeply personal paintings that pulse with emotion and sensuality. Mining movie stills, novellas, and melodramas, Dunn describes male sensuality as emotionally deep, soft, dramatic, and vulnerable. In his Artforum review, Alex Jovanovich wrote, “Dunn’s unequivocally queer work is slyly revolutionary—a raised fist that doesn’t shy away from the power of a gentle caress.” Dunn received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art. He has had solo exhibitions at Sardine and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, and has been included in exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York; Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich; Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA; Nationale, Portland, OR; Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; and Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, among others. P·P·O·W will present a solo exhibition in June 2020.

Working in paint, sculpture, and animation, Allison Schulnik (b. 1978) seamlessly transitions between mediums, imbuing her work with a distinct sensibility that melds theatricality with intense emotional vulnerability. Known for her uncanny approach to traversing the internal and immaterial terrains of nostalgia, childhood memories, and dreams, Schulnik choreographs an honest, complex, and contemporary portrait of new motherhood and life seen through the red haze and black silence of the desert. Schulnik lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. Solo exhibitions of Schulnik’s work have been presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, OK; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; ZieherSmith, New York, NY; and Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Frances, Madrid. Schulnik's work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Santa Barbara Art Museum; Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal); Laguna Art Museum; The Crocker Art Museum; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; and The Albright-Knox Gallery. Hatch, Schulnik’s first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, will open February 20, 2020.

Erin M. Riley (b. 1985) is a fiber artist who renders erotic, personal and psychologically raw imagery in hand-dyed wool tapestries. Her work explores the innate difficulty of womanhood, objectification of the female body, and traumas both large and small that weigh on the search for self-identity. Often autobiographical, Riley’s tapestries explore aspects of personal or family history, as well as local news story and popular media narratives – images that are essential to processing her own experiences and to destigmatizing trauma. Riley received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia. Riley has lectured extensively throughout the country and has had residencies at The MacDowell Colony, NH and the Museum of Art and Design, NY. Used Tape, Riley’s debut exhibition at P·P·O·W took place in May 2018. In her review for the New York Times, Jillian Steinhauer writes, “Ms. Riley successfully intertwines two strands of second-wave feminist art: the reclamation of so-called craft mediums and women’s use of their bodies. Into this she braids the distanced gaze of the still life. If the show has a thesis statement, it might be that for women, pain and pleasure remain perilously intertwined — a lesson that bears repeating in the time of #MeToo.”

Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) combines modes of abstract expressionism with Bay Area figuration to create uniquely irradiant paintings. Approaching figuration through abstracted forms, Linhares utilizes broad brushstrokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Celebrating the female body, collectivity, and communal experience, Linhares grapples with her upbringing, dreams, and memories resulting in paintings that conflate the fantastical and the everyday. Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. She was included in the influential Bad Painting exhibition at the New Museum, organized by Marcia Tucker. Her work is held in many permanent collections, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Her work is currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art: Five Propositions; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Sea Change: Highlights from PAFA’s Collection of 20th-Century Art, and Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles in All of Them Witches, organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons.

Tom Knechtel (b. 1952) constructs complex narratives based on artifice and sexuality in which a cast of human and animal characters take on fluid identities. In her 2016 interview with Knechtel for the Los Angeles Times, Carolina Miranda wrote, “his achingly crafted funny-visceral drawings and paintings take the anxieties of modern life and render them in ways that are surreal yet historical.” Knechtel has had solo exhibitions at Grant Selwyn Fine Art, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, P·P·O·W, New York, and Rosamund Felsen Gallery. In 2002, he had a 25-year retrospective entitled On Wanting to Grow Horns which opened at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in North Carolina before traveling to the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington. His work is in the permanent collections of The Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Orange County Museum of Art and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu.

In his last major body of work, Martin Wong (1946-1999) turned his attention to his own heritage, painting scenes from New York and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. In addition to depictions of local businesses and annual festivals, this series explores Bruce Lee’s impact on American popular culture, Chinese American self-awareness, along with Wong’s own identity. More explicitly than other Chinatown work, Clones of Bruce Lee, 1992 depicts Lee almost as a saint and plays with ideas of Chinese masculinity and sexuality within American culture. The actor’s iconic image as a heroic fighter propelled the popularity of the martial arts in America and created a lasting symbol of masculinity. Wong was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene during the 1970s and was involved with the performance art groups, The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness in 1999. His work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016 and traveled to the UC Berkeley Art Museum in 2017.