KLAGSBRUN STUDIOS

We are delighted to announce

UnFoldingS

Enise Carr / Judy Greenberg / Sharapat Kessler / Julie Wolfe

May 3–May 23, 2025
Fridays and Saturdays / 12–6pm, and by appointment

Curated by Vesela Sretenović

Opening reception: May 3, 5–7pm

Artists Talks: May 10, 11 am – 1pm (Sharapat Kessler and Julie Wolfe)

Artists Talks: May 17, 11 am – 1pm (Enise Carr and Judy Greenberg)

Closing Reception: May 23, 6 – 8pm

The exhibition title, UnFoldingS, plays on dual meanings. Un-folding functions as an active verb, pointing to the physical and conceptual acts of bending, twisting, curving, collapsing, disassembling, constructing, and combining—practices that characterizes the creative process behind the works. In contrast, UnfoldingS as a noun refers to the visual presence of the works: richly layered, visually compelling forms that are either two-dimensional and painterly, or three-dimensional and sculptural. Conceptually and metaphorically, "unfoldings" evoke double signification—acts of revelation and concealment, opening and obscuring, disclosure and disguise.

As both verb and noun, the title UnFoldingS suggests a playful ambiguity at the heart of the exhibition. Whether through pulling loose pages from books (Julie Wolf), cutting, pasting, and layering (Sharapat Sarsenova Kessler); superimposing bits and pieces (Enise Caar); or collapsing and mixing found boxes (Judy A. Greenberg), each artist engages in a collage-based technique. They blend a wide range of materials—often disparate and unexpected—to create compositions that embrace intuition and unpredictability while blending poignancy with poetry.

Sharapat Sarsenova Kessler, Untitled (2025), Mix-media wall installation, dimension variable

For Kessler, collage—cutting and pasting disparate materials—offers a direct pathway to self-reflection and a means of reconnecting with her heritage, especially the quilt-making traditions of her childhood. Her work blurs the lines between the real and the surreal, the dreamy and the mundane, the conscious and the subconscious. Though deeply rooted in personal narrative, Kessler’s practice radiates a poetic, playful, and lighthearted sensibility that transcends autobiography. Her compositions draw from the realms of imagination, literature, history, and the rhythmic pulse of folklore—creating visual stories that feel both intimate and expansive.

Kessler is a multimedia artist who was born in Kazakhstan and grew up in its Central Asian nomadic culture. She currently resides and works in Washington, DC. Her work has been featured at Brookside Gardens, the Carl M. Freeman Foundation, Corcoran Gallery of Art, The DC Arts Center, The Women's Club of Chevy Chase, Washington Studio School, and Yellow Barn Studio and Gallery. Kessler work is in numerous private collections across the U.S., Europe, and Kazakhstan.

www.sharapatkessler.com @sharapat_sk

Judy Greenberg, Untitled Boxes and Collages (2024-25), Canson Art Board, dimensions variable

Greenberg works from intuition. She approaches her collages and box-constructions with no preconceptions. By cutting and pasting images and texts from newspapers and magazines mostly Art in America—she creates layered, whimsical compositions and sculptural constructions that recall early 20th-century Constructivism. Her early paintings, made in the late 1960 and 1970s, were grounded in the exploration of color and abstraction, influenced by both the Washington Color School and Philip Guston. After retiring in 2018, Greenberg returned to artmaking full-time, focusing entirely on collage, which offered her space to play with form and free association. Tearing pages apart only to reassemble them into new visual configurations—and letting the material guide her—proved liberating, both aesthetically and conceptually. Some of her collages incorporate elements of surrealism and cubism; others depict abstracted cityscapes or landscapes. Several carry a tone of political revolt in response to recent events, while others reflect themes of solitude and confusion. Her box-constructions—assemblages made from various cardboard boxes she’s collected—are similarly intuitive. By collapsing, folding, and unfolding them, she reimagines their forms as obscure, tower-like structures in a range of sizes.

A native New Yorker, Greenberg studied Studio Art and Education at New York University. She moved to Washington, DC in 1975 and went on to become the Founding Director of The Kreeger Museum. From 1994 to 2017, she broadened the public’s understanding and appreciation of the arts, drawing directly on her background as a studio artist and educator. Her leadership shaped the museum’s exhibitions and programming, including the creation of The Kreeger Museum Sculpture Garden. Prior to her time at Kreeger, Greenberg was also the Founder and President of the Board of Directors of Rockville Arts Place (now VisArts). Throughout these years, she continued to make art—quietly. This exhibition marks the first public presentation of her work in Washington, DC.

[email protected]

Enise Carr, Tarp, detail (2023), Acrylic, felt, colored tape, tarp, 86.5 x 68”

Enise Carr’s Tarp is a large-scale painting, mixing acrylic, colored tape, felt, tarp.  Here, through an elaborate gestural and abstract mark-making, the artist delves into his personal, political and spiritual values and beliefs. In his words, “Tarp is about revelation and how an artist acknowledges and follows the patterns in nature and life in practice. The result is a projection of the artist's higher self that imparts possibilities to the spectator.” Indeed, by fragmenting personal memory into a bold and expressive composition, Carr managed to create a multi-layered, collaged narrative that surpasses an individual history to create a universal connection through the language of abstraction.

Carr is best known for his abstract paintings that fully embrace the investigation of from and materiality. He has exhibited and lectured throughout the United States, and most recently had a solo exhibition at the University of the District of Columbia.

Carr earned his BFA in painting from the University of Oklahoma, and his MFA from the Mount Royal  School of Art, the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He has residencies at Brandywine Workshop and Archives and at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. This summer, he will attend the Ballinglen Arts Foundation Visiting Artist Residency in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland. Carr lives and works in Washington, DC, where he moved in 2022 from Oklahoma to work with his former professor and mentor Sam Gilliam.

www.enisecarr.com @enisecarr

Julie Wolfe: The Beholder, 2024

Apophenia Press, PAN & The Dream

Wolfe’s Beholder is both an artist book and an installation. The work features loose pages taken from the book, installed in a seemingly random arrangement across a single wall, blurring the line between printed matter and spatial experience. In Beholder, Wolfe and PAN collaborated with a group of visual artists and writers to reimagine the Rococo era through a contemporary lens—exploring themes of excess, carelessness, political unrest, and growing economic inequality. The book’s contributors inhabit a choreographed interplay of voices—fictional, reflective, and surreal. These are figures who live and move within a constructed world, expressing the strange passion for self-escape that lies at the heart of the Rococo sensibility.

Wolfe is a DC-based, multimedia artist who moves freely across a wide arrange of materials and techniques. She is best known for her large abstract paintings, drawings on book pages and conceptual installations that uses color and light, exploring the external world around us and our interior lives. Her work is exhibited and collected internationally, including The American University Museum, The Allen Memorial Museum, The American University Museum and the libraries of The National Gallery of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts and The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art as well as the collections of Microsoft, Meta / Facebook and Capitol One.

www.juliewolfe.net @juliewolfeartist