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Emerging Contemporary American
Painters
January
6 – February 5, 2011
Adela Leibowitz
Jared Latimer
Margaret Murphy
CJ Collins
Josh Peters
Lori Kirkbride
hpgrp Gallery is pleased to announce
the opening of Emerging Contemporary American
Painters, an exhibition of works by artists Adela
Leibowitz, CJ Collins, Jared Latimer, Josh Peters, Lori
Kirkbride and Margaret Murphy. Although all six artists work
in a variety of styles, the show will focus on their
paintings, proving that the medium is still relevant cultural
world increasingly dominated by digital media.
Adela Leibowitz’s figurative
landscapes are inspired by both research on the occult, and
the artist’s memories of visits to ancient Zoroastrian fire
temple sites in Persia, where purity rituals were once
performed using fire and water. Obscured by fog, the unifying
product of the two elements, Leibowitz frames the female
figures in her scenes—some who bear animal heads, others who
are completely naked—using gaping caves bearing teeth that
mimic the shape of the vulva. Amongst these ethereal,
spectrally anonymous female figures appear portraits of the
American performance artist, rock musician and actress Kembra
Pfahler, with whom Leibowitz did a photo shoot with in 2009.
She is yet another addition to the cloistered, female-centric
Edens that Leibowitz so successfully constructs in her
otherworldly compositions.
Jared Latimer's "Street View" series
is inspired by his interest in exploring his own landscape
using digital mapping technologies such as Google Street View.
From the comfort of his own home, he virtually roams through
the neighborhoods around him, searching for anomalies in the
digitally replayed world. In Freyer House (2010), Latimer uses
the digitally distorted image of the house of a fellow artist
to break the line between reality and the world viewed through
the lens of a camera. In Pigeon Hollow (2010), he paints a
deer carcass lying on the side of a road divided by a yellow
line, in an attempt to subvert the traditional, idyllic
landscapes that are being painted by other artists in his
neighborhood. Attracted both to the carrion and the line of
the road which recalls Barnett Newman's paintings of the
sublime, Latimer combines references to figurative painting
and high-modernism to create a new visual vocabulary for the
digital age.
Margaret Murphy's paintings, Couple
#1, #2, #3 (2010) and Broken #1 (2010), feature broken
porcelain figurines isolated on flat turquoise backgrounds.
Although the figurines are throwbacks to a distant past (hey
are clothed in Colonial American attire), they exist very much
in the present, in a unique space frozen in the flow of
history. In their isolation, they attempt to reconcile what
has been fragmented—their own bodies from their original
context, their missing parts—signalling the ability of
objects, and perhaps the self, to persevere as time moves
inexorably forward.
The
color block paintings of CJ Collins, Islands
of Thought (2010) and The Moon Never Gave Me Much Trouble
(2010), buzz with the energy of lines converging and forming
shapes by their own volition. Very much subjective, based on
the artist's internal responses to natural phenomena that she
records in sketches and drawings, the paintings beckon for the
viewer to ascribe their own emotional readings onto the
expressionistic, vaguely figurative scenes.
Josh Peters work focuses on
psychologically charged groupings of figures that mainly
depict men and women living away from civilized society. His
most recent paintings are inspired by William Golding's Lord
of the Flies, whose two main characters—one who ruled by fear,
the other by reason—struck him as being heavily parallel to
the political figures in contemporary society. In Peters work,
an impending sense of violence or spiritual awakening lurks
just underneath the surface of the paint.
Lori Kirkbride's heavily patterned
works—Daisy (2010), Betty (2010) and Lily (2010)—are full of a
great deal of joy, inspired both by the artist's mood while
creating them, and by the spectators reaction upon viewing
them. Consisting mostly of painted daisies, which crowd and
clump together on the canvas, the compositions have a kinetic
energy. They are informed by Kirkbride's continued fascination
with the neon colors of her childhood, used in such objects as
My Little Pony® and Barbie®, as well as the patterns of the
textiles on her grandmother's sundresses and furniture. By
employing elements of play and experimentation, Kirkbride's
works emit a sense of real happiness that is rare to chance
upon in every day life.
Image:
Adela Leibowitz
House of Fire and Water
oil
on linen
52"x54"
2009/10
Courtesy of HPGRP Gallery
Photo: Adam Reich
HPGRP Gallery
529 West
20th St. 2W
New
York, NY 10011
T +1 212
727 2491
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