NYAB Event - Portraits of Ambiguity

Portraits of Ambiguity

Ana Cristea gallery

This event has ended.

Ana Cristea Gallery presents "Portraits of Ambiguity", a group show featuring the work of European artists Razvan Boar, Christian Schoeler, Alexander Tinei and George Young. All four share a lack of interest in the heroic vein of conventionally 'masculine' art; instead, their work is concerned with an exploration of vulnerability, subtlety, ambiguity, and fragility.
Christian Schoeler and Alexander Tinei are each known for their distinctive approaches to portraiture. Schoeler creates lushly-painted oils and watercolors of beautiful, often slightly androgynous young men; the subjects he depicts are vaguely erotic but seem to exist in a timeless and placeless world of reverie. Tinei's portraits have a much harder edge-the people he depicts are always physically 'marked,' and in his most recent work, their faces are often obscured. Perpetually concerned with identity (especially 'outsider' identity), Tinei's subjects are simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, familiar and yet very strange.
George Young and Razvan Boar's paintings go beyond portraiture in the traditional sense; they are not particularly concerned with the depiction of individuals as such. The figures and faces in Young's works on paper are signifiers, but what exactly they signify is left intentionally ambiguous. It is also significant that Young's paintings feel deliberately humble aesthetically; they say all they wish to say with a minimum of physical means. Boar's drawings, paintings, and collages have a similarly 'sketchy' quality; his images are fragmented, reflecting the confusion and dislocations of what can sometimes feel like a dissolving world.
[Image: Razvan Boar "Belle" (2010) Oil on canvas 47 x 47 in.]