Anita Shapolsky Gallery
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Younger Artists 2000
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Younger Artists is an exhibition of the Anita Shapolsky Gallery that brings together a varied mix of contemporary abstract artists from different parts of the world. While the gallery has traditionally exhibited the works of second generation masters of the Abstract Expressionist tradition, we recognize the young artists who are forging new and stimulating directions in abstract art, while remaining true to the tradition. Today's artists meditate on the abstract in two mediums and two ways; in painting and in sculpture, through content and physical matter. They explore content with dreamlike imagery and symbol-like forms, and examine physical matter with their surface textures, process, and application.
For many, like Martee Levi, they are a search for wholeness and relationships. Sensuality is explored by Margaret Evangeline's flow of transparent layers, pools of color, and irregularities of surface, while Amy Ernst's collages are visions of airy color in which forms appear to emerge before the eyes. Also incorporating collage, Leya Evelyn's thick application of paint and saturated colors become intensely physical, as do Una Dora Copley's pieces which incorporate found objects. Belgian artist Diane Bogaerts focuses in a ritual-like fashion on the archetype of the human figure, neither male nor female, and Tina Spiro exposes the essential aspects of life and humanity in the natural world. Sam Perry’s images adhere closely to the surface of the picture plane in a space that is arranged like aerial map abstractions. Structures and planes also distinguish Alison Weld and Carol Hunt's work, who create formal tensions by juxtaposing patterns with painterly abstraction and rhythmic movement.
The sculptors employ a variety of materials and techniques. Thomas Beckman creates spare and elegant sculpture of wood with cement and metals that are reminiscent of surrealist apparatuses and machines that defy reason. Mark Gibian crafts mysterious sculptures of transparent glass sheathed over metal-grid skeletons that recall prehistoric life forms, and straddle the organic and the industrial realms. Nancy Steinson's sculptures, with their planar forms and straight edges, could arguably be called starkly minimalist were it not for the lyrical and dynamic accents of undulating lines and slight diagonals, while Jenny Lee’s box-like metal sculpture with their sharp pointed edges and worn, rusted surfaces, recall ritualistic objects. Morfy Gikas plays between the two, savoring the touch of different textures, often within a geometric frame. In her series of women who have influenced her, she will show the Throne of Maria Callas, while sculptor David Hayes takes inspiration from nature and then paints, welds, and sandblasts his vision into grand forms of color.
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