LORRAINE PELTZ Statement

Born:  Brooklyn, NY

Resides:  Chicago, IL

CV

STATEMENT - Lorraine Peltz' recent paintings articulate fresh ideas about place and identity, presenting evocative and highly charged images that explore women's fantasies and desires.  By combining various painting languages, including recognizable imagery, signs and symbols and painterly abstraction, Peltz attempts to mimic and reconcile how information comes to us and how meaning is made, bit by bit -- real life alongside memory, poetry next to prose.  These become landscapes of an exterior world and her interior space of dream, desire, hope, and memory.  Using images of chandeliers, plums, pears, and cupcakes, Peltz playfully co-mingles the language of 17th century-esque still life objects with pop imagery of lightening bolts, puffy clouds, painted lips, rainbows, strolling legs, swans, ominous blackbirds, among others.

As Lisa Wainwright, Dean at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Professor of Art History, wrote in 2006, "Here are worlds aqueous and cosmic, airy and verdant.  These paintings glow with uncanny resonance and optical sheen.  And then Peltz interrupts the dreaminess to cast a range of signs into ethereal spaces.  Myriad symbols in their speech bubble niches hint at a narrative that unfolds from picture to picture.  Both of nature and from culture, her icons speak to the polemic between essentialism and social construction that still grips feminist discourse...the mix of aesthetic delight and conceptual reading makes.... (this) Peltz's strongest (work) to date."

BIO - Lorraine Peltz was born in Brooklyn, NY, and received her MFA from the University of Chicago and her BFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She had numerous one person shows and has been included in many group exhibitions, including those at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Galerie Piltzer in Paris, Arden Gallery in Boston, Olga Dollar Gallery in San Francisco, Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, Koscielak Gallery in Chicago, Printworks Gallery in Chicago, the Rockford Art Museum, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and many others. The exhibition “Excellent Hostess” Selected Paintings: 1995-2008, with an accompanying catalogue, will take place in July at The Center for Fine and Performing Arts, Munster, IN.  Exhibitions are planned at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL, at the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, NYC, the Betty Rymer Gallery, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL and in Verona, Italy.  Peltz lives and works in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  May 2008.

Lorraine Peltz is represented by:

Micaela Gallery, San Francisco, CA;

Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, NYC;

Koscielak Gallery, Chicago, IL