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Jerald Melberg Gallery is proud to introduce the work of acknowledged master paper maker Roland Poska (1938-2017) in Deckle Edge, a solo exhibition of paintings, sculptures and prints. This will be Poska’s first exhibition in North Carolina and will include over thirty works from his four-decade career. The Gallery is publishing a full color catalogue with an essay by Grace Cote to accompany this exhibition, available digitally at https://cld.bz/imwAowu and in print at the Gallery or by mail.  Jerald Melberg Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Roland Poska.

Poska was a pioneer in the field of printmaking and papermaking and sought to extend and break the boundaries of his chosen medium. He landed on what he called “Papestries” or paper tapestries, which are featured in this exhibition.

His process involved preparing five-gallon buckets of moist cotton fibers mixed with pure powdered pigment to achieve his desired color palette. The texture of the paper pulp varied in consistency from apple sauce to bread dough. He laid handfuls onto plastic sheeting and added elements such as handmade sliced forms and coils. After drying, Poska would flip the panel over and reveal a flattened yet technicolor abstract composition. He would then assess and sometimes alter the surface by adding more pulp, peeling away or overpainting. A sizable work could take up to six months to complete. Many works consist of multiple panels with intentionally rough and unrefined edges, a nod to the signature deckled edges of handmade paper. Late in his career, he grew his oeuvre to include large sculptures, called Sentinels, made with a similar process. These were formed into three dimensional free-standing columns before completely drying.

Roland Poska was born in Scotland in 1938 and immigrated to Rockford, Illinois when he was a child. He received degrees from Rockford College and Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he was introduced to the mechanics of paper making. He later cofounded the Milwaukee School of Art and Design and taught there while simultaneously running a lithography print studio, Fishy Whale Press. 

His work was the subject of over thirty solo exhibitions in his lifetime, including the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford Illinois; Midwest Museum of Art, Elkhart, Indiana; Milwaukee Art Museum and The Neville Public Museum, Green Bay, Wisconsin. His works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

“Art and Fashion,” an exhibition featuring fine art fashion photographers Simon Procter and Greg Lotus, is now on view in Rosenbaum Contemporary’s Boca Raton, Fla., gallery (150 Yamato Road) through October 6, 2018.

The “Art and Fashion” exhibition seeks to renew the dialogue of high-fashion aesthetics within a fine art context. Dispelling the notion of fashion photography as solely a commercial product, the photographers in “Art and Fashion” break from the traditional advertisement-driven emphasis and expand the craft to explore a more classical fine art direction.

Simon Procter incorporates his education in painting and sculpture in a technique that captures and documents the grand scale of fashion shows and the architectural spaces in which they take place. This signature synthesis of fashion photography and classical painting composition distinguishes Procter’s work, which work has been featured in publications such as “V Magazine,” “Vogue Nippon,” “Harper’s Bazaar” and “The New York Times.”

Greg Lotus reinterprets light and shadows through elegantly captured, evocative angles and masterful composition. Inspired by a range of sources, from personal life experiences to classical paintings, he uses uncommon elements that link the rarefied atmosphere of the fashion industry to the natural world. His distinctive style of photography has graced such publications as “Italian Vogue,” “Vanity Fair,” “GQ,” “L’Uomo Vogue,” and “W” magazine.

“Art and Fashion” can be viewed during regular gallery hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A special viewing will also be held for attendees of South Florida International Fashion Week’s Boca Raton runway show, to be held at the gallery on Sept. 26. Additional information and tickets for this event, benefitting Fashion for a Cause, can be found at sfifw.org.

Rosenbaum Contemporary, founded in 1979, is based in Boca Raton with a second gallery inside the St. Regis Bal Harbour Hotel in Miami. The gallery caters to international collectors interested in investment-quality works by Postwar, Modern and Contemporary masters and presents nationally recognized museum-level exhibitions throughout the year. The gallery also offers a wide range of free services to collectors worldwide including acquisition advice, art consulting, sourcing of artists, art collection building and management and resale of select works of art.

 Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art is proud to announce the exhibition Julian Opie: Recent Works, featuring the compelling iconography of this influential British pop artist. 

The exhibition includes a series of black-line relief silhouettes entitled Walking in Melbourne. as well as three-dimensional walking figures known as Melbourne Statuettes.  Additionally, the show will feature Crows., a whimsical, four-part animated light installation; Cornish Coast 2., a series of minimalist landscapes; and Heads., a suite of three-dimensional profiles on sprayed aluminum.  Also on view will be a Julian Opie self-portrait and the Nature 1. series featuring laser-cut aluminum wall reliefs depicting boats, pebbles, sheep and fish.

Tasende Gallery is pleased to present Figure & Image, a group exhibition featuring sculpture and painting of eight artists from the gallery’s roster. The exhibit opens Friday, September 7 and continues through Saturday, November 10. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 11 to 5.

The exhibit includes figurative works in bronze and marble by Fernando Botero, Andres Nagel and Armando Romero. The muscular yet poetic steel sculpture of Mark di Suvero is included as well as the subtle bronze of Riera I Arago.

Roberto Matta’s paintings provide the viewer a tour of the unconscious mind filled with interior images known as “inscapes.” While Melissa Chandon’s abstract realist paintings preserve images of times past. Jonathan Seliger blurs the line between figure and image, sculpture and painting in order to create three-dimensional objects of desire.

Tasende Gallery is located at 820 Prospect Street, La Jolla, California. For further information on the artists or to request images of the artwork, please contact us at [email protected]

Cernuda Arte to host book presentation by Cuban culture expert Emilio Cueto. 

“CUBA IN THE USA”

A Journey around the Presence

of Cuba in the United States

through the Emilio Cueto Collection 

 

When: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 | 7:00 PM

THIS PRESENTATION WILL BE CONDUCTED IN SPANISH

 

REGISTRATION FOR THESE EVENTS IS REQUIRED

Please contact Brenda Aybar (305) 461-1050 

(or) write to: [email protected] 

  SEATING IS ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST SERVE BASIS.

THE ORGANIZERS RESERVE THE RIGHT OF ADMISSION

 

ABOUT EMILIO CUETO

 

Emilio Cueto is an expert in Cuban culture, especially colonial graphic art and music. He left Cuba at age 17, among the 14,000 children spirited out through Operation Peter Pan. Cueto was one of the first exiles to visit Cuba in the 1970s. 

 

A retired attorney based in Washington D.C., Cueto previously worked for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C.

As an avid seeker and guardian of Cuban memorabilia, he presently holds in his home one of the largest private collections in the world and a vast library of Cuban-related material, including, newspapers, maps, artworks, books, periodicals, LPs, videos, posters and more…

As Cueto has said: “If it’s about Cuba it’s here, it has to be here”, adding, de todo como en botica, a Cuban phrase that means you can find a little bit of everything here, just like in a neighborhood drugstore. Cueto has written several books about Cuba, in both English and Spanish, he has also organized six concerts of Cuba-related music at Florida International University in Miami.

Bert Green Fine Art is pleased to present our third show by Helen Maurene Cooper and our second show by Christopher Ottinger.
 
Helen Maurene Cooper’s “Blue Angels” is a series of collodion photographs of the culturally diverse drag queen & drag king community in Chicago, highlighting a lack of visual representation of LGBTQ+ persons from the early days of photography. The historic wet-plate collodion technique is a rich and multi layered medium to reinvent a history of the late 19th century that presents an alternative story about inclusion. Cooper is a photographer who engages cultures to find the intersection of race, class, and gender.

 

Christopher Ottinger works with the moving image as a thing in itself, removed from a specific individual narrative and presented as an artifact of our shared cultural history. His samples are chosen from more than a century of technology: projection, scanning, and interactive video games. These images are isolated from context, and then presented along with their technology — the physical manifestations which show them as a unified phenomenon. In ARCADE, Ottinger hopes to rekindle that sense of wonder and awe that people in the past, seeing moving images for the first time, must have felt.

 

All gallery events are free and open to the public. Additional exhibition information, press releases and high resolution images may be found at the gallery website at http://bgfa.us.

Imaginary Friends
by Gabriela Noelle

July 21 – September 2, 2018

Gabriela Noelle welcomes us into an alluring and whimsical realm with the exhibition Imaginary Friends. Inspired by the subconscious of a child’s creative and inventive mind, the exhibit reveals the imagination to posses more power than concepts of reality instilled and defined in adulthood. The exhibition not only venerates youth, it celebrates the contrast between adolescence and adulthood, Earth and Man, the natural and the synthetic.

The artist, who describes herself as initially skeptical of the dependent relationship between humans and technology, has chosen to embrace the “intention of progress, [hopeful] for a day of true symbiosis and positive evolution.” Through Gabriela Noelle’s lens, we encounter a creative universe inhabited by vividly colored three-dimensional works including clusters of flowers, shimmering butterflies and dragonflies, and fantastical creatures borne of her preferred medium of Lucite. The material is paired with mirror in a collection of works, creating a broad spectrum of scintillating reflections and shadows which form essential and equally important parts of each work.

The exhibit propels themes of camouflage, chemical synthesis and transitional objects. In nature, mimetic camouflage enables prey to use protective coloration to achieve a resemblance to other objects and organisms, thereby concealing the creature in order to trick or disguise. In its philosophical practice, mimetic theory – as originated by the French polymath René Girard – explores the “observable tendency of human beings to subconsciously imitate others.”

“The series Cubes in Flatland mimics the intrinsic function of camouflage – to conceal with its bright colors – yet plays with obscuration through transparency, dimension and scale. The saturated colors in Cubes in Flatland also refer to a future where defense might be necessary, nature is mimicked, and ‘natural’ colors are no longer present; a world overly-saturated because it is man-made and artificial,” describes the artist. Created of paracord, utilized in survival equipment as well as in children’s arts and crafts, and Lucite, which gained popularity during World War II, and continues to be used in military applications, Noelle channels the dichotomy of these materials and the drastic change achieved through the manipulation of color.

Gabriela Noelle’s chemical synthesis is a hybridization of photosynthesis and the concept of synthetic. The theme originates with her series Fossils. Oversized acrylic flower sculptures are combined with repurposed painted concrete rubble from demolished buildings, allowing the artist to pay tribute to the past, while looking to the future. In the artist’s view: “From these concrete rocks, a flower emerges, synthetic at that, because our history is perpetual and our future is blossoming.” The series shifts into acrylic flowers of assorted sizes cemented in bio-fluorescent rocks, displaying the evolution of “an idea that even something man-made and synthetic has the potential to outgrow its creator and be wild. Their colorful shadows suggest that they might possess life – might have potential outside of their original intention – and are trying to communicate in the way of bio-fluorescent animals that glow not for defense but, rather, to attract a mate. Can these synthetic flowers reproduce on their own?” questions Noelle.

Her series Transitional Objects is titled to reference the term introduced by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott which labels items to which young children develop strong attachments, exploring the idea that our dreams or “make-believe” can manifest in actual, tangible forms. As Gabriela Noelle explains: “Perhaps ‘Imaginary Friends’ reveals an alternate dimension where these creatures exist yet can only be seen when liberated from the conditioning and doubts of adulthood.” The friendly, amorphous beings, observing with wide-eyed innocence, embody the unselfconscious.

Examining and honoring traditions of color exploration and experimental “land art” established by inspiring Contemporary artists Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ugo Rondinone and Robert Smithson, Gabriela Noelle invites us to a study of ontology and perception through a realm of color and distinct visual language in the exploration and participatory visual experience of Imaginary Friends.

Luisa Lignarolo and Sergio Cernuda
Introduction from the Exhibition Catalog

Every August, Santa Fe hosts one of the largest Native arts shows in the world, welcoming over 100,000 visitors. Begun officially in 1922, Indian Market is an incredible event featuring approximately 1,000 artists from over 200 tribes. During this exciting week of events, please visit the FADA Member Nedra Matteucci Galleries at their gallery and sculpture garden where they feature work by Native sculptors Doug Hyde and Michael Naranjo. 

Born in Oregon of Nez Perce and Assiniboine background, Doug Hyde is a leading Native American sculptor in stone and bronze. His work often features vignettes of Native American life; Indian Market (pictured left), depicts the longstanding tradition of selling and trading art.

 

Michael Naranjo, a Tewa Indian, is originally from Santa Clara Pueblo. At the age of nine, his father became pastor of the Baptist Indian Mission in Taos. Basic Instincts (above), celebrates his Native heritage, depicting a fight between man and buffalo. While creating this piece, he thought about Jacob and the Angel, and Jacob’s struggle with his faith in God, which inspired Naranjo’s most recent bronze, Resolution (right). Blinded at the age of 23 while serving in Vietnam, Naranjo’s talent is evident in his remarkable, inspired sculpture, rich with history and culture, alive with movement and magic. 

Artists that thrive in a variety of themes and mediums come together under a lively and organic aesthetic for this show. Carlos Alarcón, Pablo Arrázola, Armando Castro, Carolina Convers, Teresa Currea, Carlos Nariño, Alejandro de Narváez, Pablo Posada, Juan Carlos Rivero-Cintra, Pedro Ruiz, Santiago Uribe-Holguín, and Elsa Zambrano are the ones who make up this group show where nature, color, sensitivity and zest come together. Each artist evokes a series of elements that relate to the intensity and versatility of the concept of landscape, for a landscape is not just a view of the natural environment, but also a situation, a scene, a setting.
 
Teresa Currea’s delicate, subtle figures contrast with Carolina Convers’ potent color schemes and bold forms, while Elsa Zambrano’s particular way of approaching collage brings together a series of iconic elements from history and pop culture, resulting in the staging of eclectic scenes. Alejandro de Narváez, Pablo Posada, and Santiago Uribe-Holguín tackle nature using material and color, exploring their behavior and taking advantage of it until bending these elements to their will. Armando Castro, Juan Carlos Rivero-Cintra and Pedro Ruiz explore the relationship between human beings and their natural surroundings, while Carlos Nariño depicts the shocking delicacy of the celestial scenery. Pablo Arrázola and Carlos Alarcón work on portraying nature and the human figure through meticulous and sensitive strokes, and in some way, the works featured in this show present a similar concept: an imagery of nature that develops within the broad spectrum that is its relationship with human existence.