For her first showing at the gallery, Texas native, Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, will present sixteen new paintings and watercolors, which portray a ‘plentitudinous visual world’ (Cotter) inhabited by magic-realist creatures both human and half-human, masses of exotic foliage, as well as an encyclopedic array of wildlife.
An avid naturalist, Hardwicke Olivieri’s paintings (most often applied to a found wood object) depict strange, teeming, erotic worlds in which human intimacy and self-discovery are interwoven with a slowly unraveling narrative of animal lore, habitat, and behavior; all in an atmosphere of almost religious intensity. Threaded within this voluptuous world there exists a steady stream of descriptive details (poems, random thoughts, quotations, etc.), writ in letters so small and lines so winding and attenuated they appear as a sort of circulatory system, or connective tissue, for the thoughts that they elucidate.
“To fall under the spell of Olivieri’s enchanting paintings is to feel that their maker is not so much an avant garde artist who creates original images out of nothing but self-generated willpower as much as she is an archeologist who patiently explores a phantasmagorical world, disinterring its hidden splendors and presenting them to viewers, one beautiful fragment at a time.” (Pagel)
In the front gallery, Andrea Belag will be showing thirteen new gouache paintings on paper. Many of these were influenced by her travels in Cuba last season, while others were made in rapid succession immediately upon her return to her downtown studio after being evacuated for six weeks in early September. The new work shows a clear departure from the paintings of the last few years; the distinct post and lintel architectures, suggesting views from a window or a distant landscape, are now being supplanted by a more anomalous, subtly shifting interior space.