FLEISCHMANNS - A new exhibition at 1053 Gallery invites viewers into the intimate, unguarded space where art and friendship converge.
Titled 3 Friends, the show brings together Angela Dufresne, Brenda Goodman, and Mala Iqbal—three painters whose relationship has evolved from mutual admiration to creative collaboration in a remarkably short time. The exhibition opens August 2 and runs through September 7, with a public reception on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m.
The artists met only a few years ago—”love at first sight(ish),” Goodman quips—but what began as connection has deepened into an artistic kinship. Their work, while formally distinct, shares a visceral commitment to process, experimentation, and the emotional architecture of painting.
Dufresne’s irreverent gestures and figurative play collide with Goodman’s moody, improvisational abstraction. Iqbal weaves open-ended narratives through miniature-scale intricacy and compositional risk. Yet what binds them is less about style than the ongoing practice of seeing, responding, and trusting—on the canvas and in life.
The show features individual works by each artist alongside a collaborative painting, created expressly for this exhibition. It also includes a salon-style wall of paintings spanning from the 1960s to the present, underscoring both the generational breadth of the trio—spanning three decades—and the enduring relevance of painterly inquiry.
There are also drawings by Goodman and Iqbal, framed in Dufresne’s signature found-object constructions—part art object, part architectural experiment.
But it’s not only the work that is in dialogue. The exhibition reads as a collective statement: on care, on risk, on how artists don’t emerge from a vacuum but from the friction and generosity of shared lives. As Goodman puts it, “This friendship is a deeply situated anchor… it accepts all of who we are.”
If much of contemporary art has leaned into the solitary genius myth, 3 Friends pushes in the other direction. Its power lies in what’s exchanged—in eye contact, in critique, in the silence between brushstrokes.
The result is a portrait not of three artists working in parallel, but of three lives actively entwined in the act of becoming. In that way, the exhibition offers not only paintings but a model for creative survival: one rooted in trust, adaptation, and the unflashy labor of sustaining each other.
At a time when the art world often prizes the individual over the communal, 3 Friends quietly insists otherwise. It asks us to consider friendship not as an aside to the work, but as its very foundation.
3 Friends is on view at 1053 Gallery, 1053 Old Route 23, Roxbury, N.Y., through Sept. 7.
