2008 salon show, Lighting the Obscure World
Nov 13 - Dec 31, 2008
Gallery 263 is pleased to present Lighting The Obscure World, a group showing of local artists, and also the reemergence of Gallery 263 as a nonprofit art gallery and workshop/lecture/event space.
The show features works by Matt Andrade, Rick Berry, Robert Davies, Tamar Etingen, Jane Fox Hipple, Robert House, Annie Newbold, and Slavco Sokolovski. The chaotic sensuality of Hipple's work '==' is balanced with Andrade's austere and crisp floating, perhaps sinking, cathedral. The organic forms of Etingen, Newbold and Sokolovski resonate in the rear of the gallery. Etingen, a printmaker, displays monoprints of endangered animals set on abstract landscapes. Newbold brings back to life an otherwise discarded root system of Taxus Baccata, recently removed by city officials. Cycles, paths, strong forces, and fractal details are united. Sokolovski, a conservator and artist hailing from Macedonia, sets together earthy rust tones of material with paints and stains in his three works of Urban Landscapes.
Berry and House with brushes, and Davies with pencil and press, produce faces both familiar and distant, known and unknowable. House gives a large bright pop take on supermodel Kate Moss, with abstraction beyond, in his piece 'sitcom'. Berry's smaller work emerges from a black brush stroke and becomes a haunting beautiful shrouded woman. His larger work sets an anguished figure, facing far away, against a soft, sky-blue oil. Davies presents a selection of work from his upcoming book on artists who have ended their life by suicide. He shows four here: Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, and Vladimir Mayakovski, each with a poem, placed under a precisely rendered pencil portrait.
