Pontone Gallery is delighted to present Shifting Focus, a wide-ranging exhibition of works by a selection of female gallery artists who each explore a fluid and subtly nuanced relationship to their subject matter and their particular modes of expression.
Gretchen Andrew is an American-born artist who combines digital and AI-generated images to make oil paintings that explore the messy interface between algorithm and aspirational reality. She takes a machine-generated picture of an idealized female subject and manipulates it with a ‘robot’ program of her own devising. The result is a portrait of tension between who you are and who the algorithms say you should be.
British artist Yuki Aruga makes oil paintings of over-scaled floral motifs that unfurl in a virtuoso display of painterly skill. Her forensic depictions of natural forms are suffused with an expressive intensity that transcends the everyday. Like their classical antecedents, these dramatic and sensuous compositions evoke ideas of fecund growth and romantic decay.
Madeleine Gross is an American artist who makes painterly interventions to photographs. Idyllic sun-drenched landscapes are amended to include vigorously worked, painted images of interacting figures. Two worlds coexist: one of coolly observed critical distance and the other of heartfelt, willful engagement. The second of these—a female principle, untrammeled and passionate—binds together these disparate images of temporal paradise and human affection.
Canadian painter Heather Horton observes her subject through panels of thick, stained, and undulating glass. The female head is fragmented, occluded, and fugitive, glistening behind a veil of refractions and distortion. We experience identity as something approached and perceived through an intervening and modulating medium that is hard to penetrate.
Korean artist Park Jieun works on paper using a traditional method of ink-laden brushwork. From a distance, these pictures appear as abstract exercises in expressive, calligraphic handling. On closer inspection, however, tiny urban landscapes are revealed. The contemporary is contained within the traditional.
Cha Jongrye is a Korean sculptor. Birch plywood is bent and molded into three-dimensional Platonic forms, generated by exploring and multiplying the fold and the curve. The resultant pieces are evocative of a multitude of natural structures—both big and small—from the contours of the earth to the cell structure of an amoeba.
Scottish painter Sarah Muirhead makes pictures of the decorated body. Compressed, cropped, and edited into dynamic compositions, the models reveal themselves under her analytical gaze. These skillful and technically accomplished representations of sensuous human form present the ubiquitous embellished tattoos as an additional layer of meaning and narrative.
American artist Reisha Perlmutter offers up ethereal, painted images of women floating in water, as if suspended in some amniotic medium, caught between states—contemplative and detached. Her technique is precise and rooted in observation but has a shimmering, otherworldly quality that alludes to a spiritual dimension that her female subjects inhabit.
This exhibition is curated to demonstrate the wide and exciting variety of work produced by women artists associated with Pontone Gallery and coincides with Women's History Month this year.
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