“From the Dust” Exhibition

Icosahedron Gallery

This event has ended.

Icosahedron Gallery presents “From the Dust”, a group exhibition of work from five international artists, Aq Arif, Jos Biviano, Atousa Foroohary, Chrys Roboras, and Sharon Quirke, and three American artists, Nancy Bechtol, Federico Cuesta, and Val Grant. Working within the landscape genre, each of these artists interprets their immediate environment through an individualized spectrum.

World-renowned environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy has said that, “you must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.” In the work of these four artists, old elements are gathered from a collective history and a unique understanding of place; new elements represent each artist’s journey along the pathway of a constantly evolving world. It is in the inimitable expression of their pilgrimage that these artists enrich a genre formerly tied down to observation with a sense of self-exploration.

Exploring landscape through ephemeral sensations and moments, Sharon Quirke captures the fleeting elements of time and place in brightly colored landscapes rendered in vivid strokes reminiscent of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin street scenes. Quirke’s paintings are playful and fluid, capturing the nuances of atmosphere in quick, rhythmic strokes that harmoniously unite and diverge into distinct elements of form and space. Jos Biviano also addresses the transient qualities of landscapes in his works that pit rich swirling colors and against areas bathed in light. Reminiscent of the famous painter of light J. M. W. Turner, Jos's paintings capture the dramatic scale of emotion that raw environments can suggest.

Through the inclusion of shrines, buildings, and architectural details from the Mughal Empire, Aq Arif’s abstracted landscapes emphasize the human interaction with the environment. Using earth tones and overlaid patterns of geometric abstraction, Arif represents manmade structures as an extension of the natural world: beauty lies not only in the untouched horizon, but also in the hearts of men and their architectural triumphs.

In contrast to the human presence suggested by Arif’s architectural structures, Chrys Roboras explores this theme through the solitary nomadic figure immersed within each landscape. These works are less concerned with concrete suggestions and final epiphanies of the soul than the internal journey of each figure: the where, who, and why are of secondary importance to the pure state of existence. It is the understanding of such a contemporary existence that landscape paintings help us to define. As suggested by Goldsworthy, it takes a balance of death and rebirth, present and past to help us make sense of the sentiments overwhelming our existence in the world today.

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Schedule

from September 10, 2010 to October 02, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-09-16 from 19:00 to 21:00

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