Micaela Gallery is pleased to present the works of New Orleans-based artist Karoline Schleh and San Francisco-based artist Sabina Sulé.

After Hurricane Katrina, Schleh was forced to rebuild her house.  She notes: “For myself, and many, there is a dream like affect of a familiar place with not all of the pieces fitting where they used to be.”  Schleh was adamant about salvaging the old parts of her house to fit within the new.  Her windowpanes now reveal a palimpsest of paint illuminating every color of paint her house has ever been.  Her works reveal and conceal a similar concept.  Schleh’s body of work is titled “Stereo” referring to seeing in stereo with two eyes and seeing the same situation, place, person, event from two different view points.  She verbalizes her work dealing with “perception and the futility of record keeping, my ever present backwards handwriting notes containing my thoughts from when each work was made.”

Similarly, Azerbaijan-born Sabina Sulé presents work that can be seen as abstraction of what she chooses to reveal to her viewer. Beginning with precise realistic drawings of people from live models or photos, she then paints over the drawing with a transparent layer of color. Subsequent construction of her work is made by another drawing of a human figure, followed again by transparent layers of paint, thereby fragmenting the image to a familiar yet unrecognizable form.  “I often scrape off top layers to uncover the underlying images and rearrange them. I continue this until the painting loses most of its representational aspect.”

Both artists use traces and fragments to disclose their imagery, leaving the viewer to place themselves within the work and locate the fragment to create the whole.

Left image: Karoline Schleh, "Green Boat Tracings."  Oil, acrylic and graphite on birch panel. 48 x 48 in. 2008.

Right image:  Sabina Sulé, "Untitled 29."  Oil on canvas. 60 x 48 in. 2005.