NYAB Event - Tiffany Bozic "Transformation"

Tiffany Bozic "Transformation"

Joshua Liner Gallery

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Joshua Liner Gallery presents Transformation, an exhibition of new paintings by the San Francisco-based artist Tiffany Bozic. This is Bozic’s second solo show with the gallery.

Featuring works in acrylic on maple panel (Bozic’s signature surface), Transformation showcases the artist’s meticulous rendering of animal and plant subjects that recasts nature as fable. In small to medium-sized paintings, Bozic explores themes informed by her personal experience of becoming a mother: “From the shifting perspective of a new mom, I thought a lot about the planet into which I was bringing my daughter. Some of the paintings reflect the sacrifice and transformative changes of pregnancy,” says the artist. “I also tried to create an altruistic antidote for the gloomy-hearted in a kind of ecstatic fascination for the natural environment.”

This fascination is displayed in This Sweet Old World, a harmonious still life that brings together such disparate elements as flowers, insects, and a resplendent kingfisher. Even more dynamically contrasted, Velvet Mites on a Snowflake depicts nature at wildly different scales while showing off the artist’s masterful skills as a painter. Tiny Matter—a light-filled, floating mélange of vegetal tubers, snail, and elephant fetus—reflects quietly and delicately on the gestational period; whereas Oil Slick presents a dark, frenetic tangle of adult grackles whose plumage is rendered in an astonishing range of blues and purples. Says Bozic, “I want to remind the viewer that we live in a playful and mysterious world, breathtaking in its complexity and simplicity, and to celebrate our role as stewards of the planet.”

Entirely self-taught, Bozic and her choice of subjects are inspired by extensive travels to remote wild places around the world, as well as her study of research specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The artist has developed a complex process of masking and staining the maple panels used in her paintings, thereby incorporating the wood’s natural grain as she builds up compositions with thin layers of acrylic. Her work has the traditional feel of Flemish still life painting, displaying a highly emotional range of fabulist themes. In 2012, the artist’s first monograph, Tiffany Bozic: Drawn by Instinct, was published by Gingko Press, Berkeley.

[Image: Tiffany Bozic "Salinity" (2012) Acrylic on maple panel, 36 x 42 in.]