"Quartet" Exhibition

Sara Meltzer Gallery

poster for "Quartet" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Sara Meltzer Gallery presents Quartet, an exhibition of works by gallery artists Felipe Barbosa, Sarah Cain, Stephen Dean and Edgar Orlaineta that portray four diverse voices in the abstraction of materials, concepts, function and forms.

Brazilian artist Felipe Barbosa (born 1978, lives in Rio de Janeiro) re-contextualizes common materials and accentuates their formal qualities by creating repetitive yet dynamic compositions. Although constructed manually, his sculptures are indicative of the mass-production process used to manufacture the materials. A plane of ties are sewn together along their edges to create a staggering field of color and patterns that embody a playfulness and fluidity contrary to the common affiliations of these garments. Pinned to the wall, the ties sag and flop, re-situating themselves from something ordinary into a rhythmical movement of fabric and color.

Moving fluidly between works on paper, paint – on and off the canvas and wall, as well as site-specific installation, Sarah Cain (born 1979, lives in Los Angeles) makes adept use of her materials. Geometric abstractions at first glance, Cain's drawings and paintings disrupt the legacy of modernist abstraction by combining or juxtaposing ostensibly incongruent color, shapes and materials – doilies, sand, fabric, synthetic flowers, beads, paints of all kinds and gold leaf on paper, books or sheets of music. Cain's approach to color, pattern, movement and a use of objects that she describes as having "found" their way into her life, subvert and deny easy categorization. Instead, Cain creates unique visual atmospheres in which the more lyrical and emotive qualities of such polar opposites as abstract painting and craft, for example, collapse into a distinctive form of communication.

The work of Stephen Dean (born 1968, lives in New York) is engaged with color and its existence in cultural rituals and formal structures. His sculptures and works on paper interject color into pre-existing systems of organization and transform them into abstract compositions. In this ongoing series the artist uses weather maps from newspapers as templates for unexpected arrangements. Painting within the confines of the map’s graphic lines seems a simple gesture, yet by doing so, the artist confuses the familiarity of the image and subordinates both the idea and physical manifestation of the maps. Reminiscent of miniature paintings in scale and illuminated manuscripts in their use of saturation of hues and bold lines, these drawings continue the artist’s consideration of notions of painting and the inherent ability of color to convey information.

In the series Chance Encounters, Edgar Orlaineta (born 1972, lives in Mexico City) combines ideas and forms drawn from modernist art and design. The title of the series is borrowed from the pre-surrealist writer Comte de Lautréamont's famous line "as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an
umbrella!" Drawing from this example of surrealist dislocation and the ready-made tradition, Orlaineta positions seemingly dissimilar objects - iconic pieces of modern art and Italian design combined with swatches of 1980's popular graphic design – into a single visual composition. Orlaineta posits random encounters and formal coincidences to examine the cultural values that shape our perception of the objects around us.

Media

Schedule

from March 05, 2010 to April 10, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-03-05 from 18:00 to 20:00

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