 | Micaëla Gallery 333 Hayes Street San Francisco, CA 94102 415.551.8118 f 415.551.8138 info@micaela.com |
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NOVUS + NEOS by introduces new artists and new works for the New Year! NOVUS + NEOS, a modern exhibition of video art, paintings and fine art glass sculpture. Works are by European and American artists. Exhibiting artists include Ned Cantrell (Glass - Denmark), Federico Correa (Painting - Mexico), Peter Foucault (Video - California), William Gambini (Painting - California), Scott Kiernan (Video - California), Bethany Marchman (Painting - Georgia), Lee Miltier (Glass - California), Michel Pagnoux (Painting - France), Sieglinde Van Damme (Video - California), Daniel Wooddell (Glass - Hawaii) and Anna Efanova (Painting - California). Ned Cantrell, originally from England, made Denmark his home to pursue his passion for glass sculpture. Cantrell derives great pleasure from blowing glass – he loves the workshop, the tools and the flames. His work involves concepts of contrast – ancient/modern, high culture/mass culture, fluidity/plasticity, function/impotence, and beauty/banality. Hawaiian-born glassblowers, Lee Miltier and Daniel Wooddell, colleagues and friends, approach glass with a skilled fine art perspective. Miltier’s highly personal style, vivid imagination and expert technical skill come together in elegantly humorous work. His understanding of the importance of light and form in his sculptures is classically disciplined and original. Miltier’s work of unexpectedly willowy shapes, beautifully brilliant colored 9-foot tall vessels that seem poised for ready flight on impossibly small feet were created with the close collaboration of Daniel Wooddell, master cane builder and former Pilchuk apprentice. Wooddell, a BFA graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts, apprenticed with Chuck Vanatta and Guido Gerlitz. Wooddell’s blown glasswork uses fine glass cane to create exquisite filigrana vessels. Newly minted graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA), Peter Foucault’s work examines the mechanics of art and resulting perceptions. His works, primarily paper and video, and collaborations of both, are finely tuned demonstrations of art creation and destruction. Precisely executed, it lends a bittersweet message to the ephemeral quality of art. His colleague and comrade at arms, Scott Kiernan, whose nom de guerre, the ZENITH FOUNDATION, is given to his ongoing multidisciplinary collage of evolving work. A modernist, his work continually mines themes that include: ways in which “old” becomes “new”, cycles of desire and anxiety and how they become “realer” than any physical entities, the experiential nature of sound/music, light and geometry; and a possible linguistic and emotional skewing of the mechanistic models of math and science. Sieglinde Van Damme, born in Belgium, works with notions of ambiguity and the “gray zones” in life, such as the perpetually shifting social perceptions of truths. Her video work juxtaposes light with shadow to freely exploit text to explore ideas of ambiguity (and irony). William Gambini is the last living artist to have worked and studied under Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning and other masters from the post WW II New York School. At first a pure abstract expressionist, Gambini’s painting swung to the highly energetic figurative style during 1950-1990. Gambini states, "Painting for me is a visual experience; a learning process of life and living. I do not have a technique; instead, I use a method, which I have developed over the years. The arrangement of configurations, with pigment and color placed on the flat 2-dimensional canvas surface, creates light in time and space without shadows, modeling or perspective." Recipient of the Rothko and Pollock/Krasner awards, Gambini introduces his renewed abstract expressionist work. California-born Federico Correa studied under Babe Shapiro, New York painter and founder of the Mount Royal Graduate School of Art. Correa's large-scale paintings were described (by Timothy Close) as visually compelling, emotionally violent and painful. Amorphous “figures hover and occupy large portions of the canvas, secondary characters are usually intertwined in sexually oriented positions. They collide physically and emotionally with one another as if in a dream.” Mr. Correa resides in Mexico. Bethany Marchman, born in 1974, Winter Park, FL, uses traditional oil painting to portray popular/ kitsch culture with themes of childhood and innocence. Marchman draws on influences - from comic books, classic toys and retro/ paranoid advertising to cheese cake/pin up sex kittens from the 1950s/1960s (by Skot Foreman). While Marchman’s work is coyly amusing, her work invites the viewer to share her wry understanding of modern life’s often clichéd icons. Michel Pagnoux travels the world searching for truth and happiness. In the late 1960s, his universe collided with surrealism and the psychedelic revolution, and the natural son of John Lennon and Marcel Duchamp was born. A child of the rebellious avant-garde culture of Old Europe and the counter culture of the flower children, his interpretation of Andre Breton’s formula for “Beauty will have to be convulsive or not be” led to his light hearted exploration of the meaning of life and continuing body of paintings. “SOLID-COMICS” resulted from Pagnoux’ pursuit of delight from simple drawings to paintings, illustrations, sculptures and a complete world whose exploration began more than three decades ago and will probably never end. For further information please contact: |
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