NYAB Event - Marc Petrovic "Avian"

Marc Petrovic "Avian"

Heller Gallery

This event has ended.

Heller Gallery presents Avian, a solo exhibition of new work by American artist Marc Petrovic.

For nearly two decades Marc Petrovic has employed birds and bird imagery as a metaphor for his ruminations on relationships, parenting, home, shelter, and geographical identification. As an artist, he has been drawn to the ideas of identity that grow out of a sense of place and self. In his most recent series, Avian, he takes a closer look at his subject as he pixelates, deconstructs and then reconstructs a bird. They are built, much like we are - one piece, or experience, at a time.

Because Petrovic uses glass as his medium, the pixels are his murrini - slices of variously colored and layered glass canes. He assembles and fuses them into abstract patterned tablets, which he views as fully realized deconstructed birds and finally transforms them, through his own, “hot-origami” process, into seemingly sentient birds.

He has pioneered the combination of two glass-making techniques (the ‘murrine roll-up’ and hot-sculpting) to create figurative work. Asked about what led him to manipulate the initial abstractions and transform them into representational work, he writes: “The ‘murrine roll-up’ process helped me further express the ideas of patterning...standing out, blending in, protection, camouflage, attracting a mate...our own mapping and blueprinting, genetic code, pixelation...our idea of self and self expression. I used a process to help me physically work on these ideas and filled my need as an artist.” Petrovic’s ability to easily go between obsessive, meditative labor, visionary abstraction and poignant representation is what sets his practice apart.

Marc Petrovic will be doing an invitation-only demonstration & making of one of his Avian pieces on Saturday, September 8, 2012 at 11am at Brooklyn Glass (http://www.brooklynglass.com/). The event is organized by Heller Gallery and Brooklyn Glass to benefit UrbanGlass.

Marc Petrovic received his BFA in 1991 from the Cleveland Institute of Art. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Canada and Japan. He is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, FL and the Niijima Glass Art Museum in Niijima, Japan.