ANDREA BELAG: New Paintings and WHITE: A Group Show
October 16 Ð November 15, 2003
For her latest exhibition at the gallery, Andrea Belag will present nine new medium-scale abstract oil paintings on canvas, applying her signature style of broad, confident, sable-brush strokes, which are simultaneously fluid and controlled, combined with more recent atmospheric, scumbled cores and resolute edges, roughed-out recesses, and areas of nascent figuration.
While before, BelagÕs paintings relied upon the generous, and unexpected, juxtaposition of contrasting hues, these new works take a single, predominant primary color as their source of departure; that color is then supported and enhanced by subtle gradations of the same value. By reducing the tonality of the images, other formal elements, such as brush handling, saturation, and pictorial density take precedence.
Ò[In BelagÕs paintings] the life of the world impresses itself upon the senses and goes behind them, or sinks underneath, so that sense memory mingles with other indicators of evolving identity to be converted to intuitions about deep structure and deep feeling. The repetitions in Belag's painting process, her material engagement with paint as a fluid body draped and pushed by her own physical exertions, ripen such intuitions into a language whose mŽtier, really, is energy.Ó (Westfall)
In the front gallery, a group exhibition entitled White will bring together paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, all based on the concept of the color that combines all colors. The participating artists include: Noriko Ambe, Eve Aschheim, Lois Dodd, Chie Fueki, Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz, Suzanne McClelland, William Pope L., Dorothea Rockburne, and Gil Shani.