NYAB Event - "Momentum, Movement of the City" Exhibition

"Momentum, Movement of the City" Exhibition

ROOM

This event has ended.

This exhibition, organized by ROOM & Allen Gallery, pays homage to the speed of thought that we have grown accustom to living and working in New York. Each piece carefully displays the movement and energy of the city utilizing various medium.

Helen Brough's homage to New York was inspired by its multi-faceted diversity, speed of thought and action. This has lead to a gathering of directions in terms of thoughts and materials. Therefore Helen's practice is multi-directional and there are several mediums that Brough is systematically exploring.
In this series of paintings titled Urban Movements, the main inspiration is the urgency of movement and sense of place. These kinetic paintings are created in layers and have a depth of light and color. Although the layers are indistinguishable from each other, bands of colored pigments contained in each layer give off a vigorous burst of movement. The colors create a sense of space, displaying the energy of the city. Each oil-on-aluminum piece is titled after a district in New York City. The ultimate surface is arrived at through a process of application and elimination that is painstakingly precise.

Helen originally from London has made New York her home for the past six years, with her studio in DUMBO near 70 Washington where her most recent and highly publicized sculpture has been placed. Brough received a BA in painting and an MFA in Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art in London and was awarded the Prince Charles Travel Award to Italy. At Chelsea School of London Brough received First Class Honors upon graduation.

Typically, Peter Bocour chooses a square shape canvas as the arena for the painting. This format eradicates any reference one might have to landscape or figure, implicit when employing the rectangular shape.

Using bold, energetic and sometimes calligraphic marks, Bocour produces shapes and spaces of varied and contradictory clarity. Looking at the paintings the viewer may enjoy feeling twisted around and ready for the ride.

Gestured, free flowing mark and line are painted on backgrounds of bright and powerful color, often placing us in a tropical environment. The contrast of the background color moves in syncopated rhythm with the tension filled placement of painted splatters.

The paintings present an active swashbuckling life force, subtly held in place with an underlying stasis. As the viewer, we can take comfort in a structure supporting unpredictable painterly marks of movement and the tenuous relationship of these forces to the underlying structure of the work

Peter Bocour received an MFA from UC Berkeley CA. 1976 and an Undergraduate degree from New York University, 1972. Bocour also participated in an artist residency at the prestigious, Skowhegan School.

Jim Napierala's elegant yet expressive Flashe, aluminum leaf, and acrylic paintings on wood panel are multi-layered, both materially and metaphorically. Layers of paint and leaf veil one another, both concealing and revealing what lies beneath. The overlay of faceted color and form result in a beguiling and optically complex visual experience. A distillation of modernist strategies provides an abstract of the painting of the last 100 years. The work channels Impressionism's retinal effects, Expressionism's gesture, Surrealism's automatic bio-morphism, and Minimalism's obsession with the grid. Napierala's work mirrors the visual cacophony that we encounter every day, while evoking the history of modernism. They are a Cubist harlequin run amok in twenty-first century New York.
Jim Napierala was born in Buffalo, NY. He graduated with degrees in Sculpture and Art History from SUNY Buffalo, and later Studied Art History at Hunter College. He began painting in the 1980's, and is in essence self-taught, having never had any formal training. He has exhibited at several galleries in New York and throughout the country since the 1980's and is represented in numerous private and corporate collections.

Curated by Michel Allen