Richard Brintzenhofe, Darrel Ellis, Miguel Ferrando

STOREY GALLERY is thrilled to present an exhibition bringing together the work of Richard Brintzenhofe, Darrel Ellis, and Miguel Ferrando—three artists and close friends whose lives and practices were intertwined within the downtown New York art world of the 1970s and 1980s, and whose careers were cut short by the AIDS pandemic.

Presented together in a dedicated exhibition for the first time, their work reveals a remarkable network of friendship, artistic exchange, and shared influence. Their lives intersected not only with one another but also with a wider constellation of artists and cultural figures including Robert Wilson, Peter Hujar, and Malcolm Morley. Moving between portraiture and self-portraiture, still life, landscape, art-historical reference, and deeply personal imagery, Brintzenhofe, Ellis, and Ferrando each developed singular practices while looking closely at—and learning from—one another.

Across paintings, drawings, and photographs, images recur within other images: artworks, reproductions, books, photographs, models, and drawings appear as physical objects inside another work, while details from studios and domestic interiors emerge as subjects in their own right. This recursive quality gives the work a field-note sensibility, grounded in close observation and sustained attention. There is an intimacy and sensitivity to this way of looking—a quieter, more personal sensibility that sits apart from some of the harder-edged visual languages commonly associated with downtown New York in the 1980s. Seemingly peripheral details become charged with memory and feeling, and the ordinary becomes a means of registering relationships, environments, and the texture of a shared artistic life.

The exhibition brings renewed attention to three interconnected artistic lives and to a history of queer artistic exchange irrevocably altered by AIDS.

Co-organized with Candice Madey.