Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to present artists Deborah Brown, John Bradford, Nadine Faraj, Bradley Hart, Kaletski, Andrew Lyght, and MARCK in the group exhibition IMPROMPTU.
DEBORAH BROWN captures the beauty and nostalgia imbued in everyday moments. The viewer follows the artist’s dog, Trout, on the daily walks through their Brooklyn neighborhood. Structured around absence, the human protagonist in Brown’s paintings is represented by a shadow, connected by a leash to a dog in the foreground. The shadows extend far into the distance, creating odd distortions and patterns. Brown depicts the multifaceted structures present in urban spaces - stop signs, telephone poles, light stanchions, fences, grates, sidewalk paving and spray-painted symbols.
JOHN BRADFORD employs both graphic tonalities and intense chromatic colors, palette knife scrapes and hits, bangs and touches of his brush and fingers, but, above all, with his piles and piles of paint. The sheer plasticity and expressionist aggression of Bradford’s negative spaces create “significant narrative gestures” throughout the pictorial surface to celebrate something entirely new: field painting of history. The magic is that a wide range of subjects, treated in surprisingly different ways, is so clearly the vision of a singular sensibility still committed to finding relevancy in our so tenuously shared national narrative.
NADINE FARAJ deftly harnesses the volatility of the watercolor medium. She mediates restraint over the pigment’s boundaries through various techniques. The interaction of diluted colors results in a dynamic feeling of movement from a seemingly hallucinatory perspective. Hyperbolic attributes lend a sense of eroticism while the self-conscious or contemplative facial reactions express a profound awareness and sincerity. The distortions that affect these figures remark on the fluidity of identity within specific boundaries of societal contexts.
BRADLEY HART has invented his own conceptually complex system of art making that allows for the continual spawning of related works. Through his creative process utilizing thousands of syringes of acrylic paint, the artist transforms bubble wrap into pixelated photorealistic paintings. The common material typically used to protect artworks now takes the forefront and is endowed with vibrant life. This meticulous technique creates reactions with paint that lead to further unique methods of representing the initial image.
KALETSKI was born and raised in Soviet Russia where he refused to paint within the confines of Socialist Realism. The pursuit of his true artistic style thrived in the underground of secret art shows and protest song performances. In 1975, fleeing political prosecution and the threat of arrest, Kaletski left USSR and came to New York. The first years in America as an artist without money to buy paint or canvas, the artist was drawn by his natural talent for improvisation to the thousands of cardboard boxes that are strewn throughout the streets of the New York City. These unlikely materials provided the perfect beginning for the artist’s development of a dynamic oeuvre marked by experimentation and humor.
ANDREW LYGHT emphasizes simple geometry, serial repetition of form and intense color. His work bears a signature style identified by free line Prismacolor drawings that operate as code language and reference ancient mystical forms like the Nazca Lines in Peru and petroglyphs that you may recognize from his home of Guyana. Since their original meaning is unknown, the lines document prehistoric gestures used to record cultural life and religious beliefs. While the motifs on the drawings differ, they evince a desire to communicate and become their own unique blueprint.
MARCK’s video sculptures of perpetual movement are a logical consequence of his extensive experimentation with films, videos, multimedia-based projects, performances, music and sculptural as well as kinetic objects. The artist’s eternally looping footages predominantly suggest actions of Sisyphean circumstances as means of examining the theme of existential absurdity at the heart of humanity’s persistent desire to find truth and meaning.
For further information, please contact Marie Nyquist at 212-243-2100 or via email at marie@annazorinagallery.com.