Pure Paint II
September 17 - October 25 Opening September 17, 6 - 9 pm
Nola Zirin Joan Grubin Dan Fenelon Diane Rolnick Serena Bocchino Robert Sagerman Bernardo Siciliano Eleanor Schimmel Photographer Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy Sculptures of Scott Endsley.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PURE PAINT II, featuring contemporary artists Serena Bocchino, Dan Fenelon, Joan Grubin, Diane Rolnick, Robert Sagerman, Eleanor Schimmel, Bernardo Siciliano, Nola Zirin at HENRY GREGG GALLERY Sept 17-Oct 25. Opening Night Reception Thursday September 17.
With resilience and determination, the Henry Gregg Gallery begins its sixth year in DUMBO with PURE PAINT II, a group show conceived as a reminder to the digital age of the enduring primacy of paint as a medium for expressing the ineffable; an exhibition with the same mandate was mounted in 2005.
The artists in the Fall exhibition pursue a wide spectrum of methodologies and subject matter in their individual responses to cultural and socio-political realities with a high level of craftsmanship and technical mastery.
The public is welcome to the opening night reception on the evening of Thursday, September 17th from 6:00-9:00 pm at the Henry Gregg Gallery, 111 Front Street, Suite 226, in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
FEATURED ARTISTS: New Yorker Serena Bocchino generates electrifying rhythms in poured pop colors, drawing on "today's sounds of music," in the artist's words, and the energies of the street.
Dan Fenelon's brilliant canvases fuse cartooning, urban modernism and ancient, labor-intensive tribal motifs in an explosion of vibrant color.
Joan Grubin orchestrates optical experiences that explore the act of seeing itself, deploying reflected color with buried fluorescents to raise questions about the discrepancy between what is seen and what is known.
Diane Rolnick, a New Yorker now living in New Mexico, immerses digital imagery in encaustic, an ancient and dimensional technique in which pigment is mixed with wax, in a post-9/11 body of work she calls "Conversations," dialogues with herself, her circle and a growing animal family.
Robert Sagerman builds deep, 3-dimensional surfaces in oil paint, in a time-consuming, contemplative process arising from his study of medieval Jewish mystical tradition wherein numbers were assigned to represent letters, words and phrases. Each work is accompanied by a ledger containing color swatches and precise counts of the marks applied.
Suspended forms in the carved and layered surfaces of Eleanor Schimmel's encaustic paintings have a conductive, mystical power; glinting industrial landscapes and unflinching portraits by the Italian artist Bernardo Siciliano, shiver and shimmer in the "violent, blinding" light he finds in New York.
With spray enamel, oil paints and stencils on canvas and panel, Nola Zirin uses ellipses and tangents to explore concepts of time and space.
Inquiries may be directed to the gallery owner, Andre Martinez Reed, at 718-408-1090 or art@henrygregggallery.com.
The Henry Gregg Gallery is open Wed, Thurs, Sat from Noon-6pm, and Fridays from Noon-5pm. By subway: F to York Street or A,C to High Street in Brooklyn.
PURE PAINT II Notes on the Artists Serena Bocchino’s paintings begin not with color or line, but with texture, poured colors in concert with “space-implying” textures inspired by American jazz, with its subdivisions and accents, and the energies of the urban street. She has earned herself a place in a line that leads to Whistler, who often presented his work as ''nocturnes'' or ''symphonies,'' and Mondrian.
In a studio visit recounted at length in The New York Times, Barry Schwabsky observed that her paintings “insinuate half-forgotten sights and sounds into a vividly immediate contest” and further that, “Only jazz could have taught her that you can wear your heart on your sleeve -- if the cut of the sleeve is irreproachably elegant.”
Dan “Wavedog” Fenelon has been an artist from the get-go. His vivid, energetic paintings and sculpture have appeared in galleries and museums in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, Santa Fe and Chicago; his graphic design resume includes national sports logo designs and creations for Hot Wheels and Mad Libs. He also creates and animates cartoons, designs websites and provides guidance to Madison, New Jersey’s teenage artists building their college portfolios. His vibrant, labor- and color-intensive work fuses tribal animal and ornamental motifs with elements of cartooning and street modernism and draws on iconographies not limited to The Simpsons, Meso-American folk art and Japanese pocket monsters
Joan Grubin orchestrates optical experiences that explore the act of seeing itself, deploying reflected color with hidden fluorescents to raise questions about the discrepancy between what is seen and what is known. Each of her works functions as an interaction between color as pigment and color as light, with the two often conflated in spatially ambiguous ways and drawing on the vocabulary of geometric abstraction. Her current work derives a good part of its meaning from the tension between maximum optical energy and minimal physical materiality.
Diane Rolnick, a native New Yorker and self-described internet news junkie living in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, has turned away from oil paint in recent years in favor of encaustic, an ancient, dimensional technique in which pigment is combined with resin and beeswax and manipulated using heat. Encaustic may be layered, carved, “invaded” with other materials, allowing Rolnick to immerse digital and photographic imagery in wax and experiment with relief forms. Her current work is the latest expression of her lifelong fascination with human demeanor in particular circumstances.
Eleanor Schimmel’s inventive use of encaustic, the venerable method of painting with pigmented wax, has elicited high praise and prestigious awards for more than 25 years. Writing in The New York Times, Helen A. Harrison perceived a resonance with the early 20th century American tonalist Albert Pinkham Ryder, while The Philadelphia Inquirerdescribed her art as “mystical in an archaic way, implying the enormous vitality of nature and its historical continuity … in an atavistic manner that makes it seem like a Neolithic icon.” She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and is a graduate of Moore College of Art and Design. Her studio is in the Arts Building in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Using spray enamel, oil paints and stencils on canvas and panel, Nola Zirin, a longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism, lately has been employing ellipses and tangents to explore personal concepts of time and space. A member of the American Abstract Artist Group, Ms. Zirin was born and still works in New York City; her studio is nearby. She studied painting at NYU with Milton Resnick and George Ortman and printmaking with Bob Blackburn and has had her work welcomed into public, private and corporate collections worldwide including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Heckscher Museum of Art, the National Museum of Taiwan, and the Library of Congress. Recent Paintings was at Soho’s June Kelly Gallery earlier this year.
Robert Sagerman builds deep, 3-dimensional surfaces in oil paint, in a time-consuming, contemplative process arising from his deep study of Jewish mystic traditions of the 12thand 13th centuries in which numbers became the focus of religious meditative activity and were assigned to represent sacred letters, words and phrases in such a way that numerical equivalences between unrelated words became the basis for potentially endless scriptural reinterpretation. Each of Sagerman’s exacting paintings is accompanied by a ledger including color swatches, each associated with a number, and precise counts of the marks applied amounting to, in his own words, “a record of the pathway to the realized presence of a given painting.” He was born in Bayside in 1966.
André with James Rosenquist at the show
