Contemporary artists the gallery represent. From museum collected to emerging artist, Gurari Collections strives to exhibit artists whose technical mastery is evident and artistic expression is consummate.
AUTUMN 2011 Exhibitions
THE PARTHENON FRIEZES by By Wendy Artin, watercolor paintings, November 4 - 28, 2011
Wendy Artin’s November exhibition entitled THE PARTHENON FRIEZES, at Gurari Collections, is a demonstration of patience, endurance, visual insight and painting mastery. Galleried at the British Museum, the Parthenon sculptures enjoy world renown for their representational beauty, conflict of a storied past, and their sheer magnitude of sculptural presence. The large monochromatic watercolor paintings in this new series are life-size in scale so as to best evoke the splendor of this ancient parade.
As found on YOUTUBE
See Review on Arts Fuse
CONTEMPLATING VANITY by Leon Steinmetz, work-on-paper, October 7 - 31, 2011
SPRING 2011 EXHIBITIONS
FLORASYNTHESIS - by Vico Fabbris, watercolor paintings and work-on-paper, May 6 - 29, 2011
In FLORASYNTHESIS, the exhibition expands upon the artist’s exploration of imagined botanicals. Culled from his familiarity with nature, plant and flower species, as well as pollinating insects, Vico Fabbris has synthesized his fantasies drawn from reality and imagination. He envisions a world of the slightly surrealistic, complete with fictitious latin names or a genus story as part of the painting. He is especially attuned to the loss of nature and the fragility of botanical species. He replaces the lost habitat with these “flights of fantasy”.
In this new exhibition Fabbris pushes his painting technique in new directions. Loose and expressive, his work proposes plants and flowers with a scientific level of detail, yet his creations have an enigmatic flair that presupposes believability. Fabbris’ botanical world seems familiar yet it clearly is not.
In so doing, he delights the eye by creating the satirical and absurd as well as the “almost real”. Whether engaged by an imagined context, by a supporting story, or alone in mid-air suspension, Vico Fabbris’ artwork is exuberant and a celebration of the inventive mind.
FLORASYNTHESIS
Ken Goldstrom - WORK-IN-CLAY, June 3 - 26, 2011
Gurari Collections is pleased to present an exhibition of work-in-clay by the artist Ken Goldstrom. Sculptures, plaques and tiles are armatures for his evocative imagination. Each work of art possess it’s own distinctive character. In fact, these characters, awakened by a childlike curiosity, seem familiar, but are not. Instead, they are Ken Goldstrom’s world brought to life by his mastery in claywork. In turn, we get to indulge in his whimsical creations which are delightful in an age of anxiety.
A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Ken has supported himself as a working artist in Massachusetts for the last thirty years. Skilled in all methodologies of the ceramic arts, he works the three-dimensionality of clay into forms endowed with character. Ken's work transcends the broader context by reducing his symbols to the folkloric.
As found in Time Out Boston magazine
AUTOMATA - ENERGY IN MOTION, December 3, 2010 - January 15, 2011, by environmental artist Joan Brigham.
An exhibition of kinetic glass sculptures in steam, glass, water and electricity. By definition, automata are self-operating machines to demonstrate scientific principles or for whimsy. Their origins can be traced to the Hellenistic period of Heron, known also as Hero of Alexandria. Hero has been credited with the invention of the aeolipile, a steam engine that generates rotation of a solid object, as many of the work in this exhibition exemplify. Throughout history, scientists and inventors have developed sophisticated technologies based on these principals, while artists continue to explore the use of energy in art. Joan Brigham has explored this notion throughout her career as an artist and educator. A permanent example, Galaxy Fountain, by Ms. Brigham is a steam and water generating iconic fixture in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts. By working large, and in small scale, these artful inventions add wonder to our experiences.
A Research Fellow from 1974 -1999 at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T, and Professor Emeritus in Fine Art, Emerson College, Joan Brigham has been advancing the relationship of science and the arts. The intersection of these disciplines continues to resonate in laboratory and studio. Stepping back to the engines of the ancients, applying them to contemporary concepts, she allows for a timeless connection of science and the arts. Come join us in reveling in - energy in motion.
NINE BY SIX - October 29 - November 28, 2010. An Exhibition by Stephen Harby, Alexander Purves, Buzz Yudell, Wendy Artin, Tina Beebe, and Jeremiah Eck
EXHIBITION IMAGES: NINE BY SIX
Gurari Collections is pleased to present NINE BY SIX, an exhibition by six artists who all have a love of plein air painting. It all started with a grant. When Stephen Harby got the Gabriel grant he suddenly worried that his technique would not be up to the challenge, and his colleague Tina Beebe came up with the brilliant idea of hiring a watercolor teacher. The watercolor group they formed with Buzz Yudell expanded, retracted and traveled, painting and visiting architecture, from California to Morocco, Sicily, Provence. Stephen soared through the Gabriel grant, only once being required by his rather severe but gimlet-eyed French advisor to rinse his too colorful painting beneath the robinet.
Tina and Buzz were protégés of Charles Moore, then Dean of Architecture at Yale, who inspired Buzz to to pursue architecture, Tina to devote herself to architectural color, and both of them to follow him to California. Thinking it would be fun just for a year, they have now been there for thirty-five, married, with thriving firm and followers.
When Alec Purves was offered the possibility of teaching a Yale graduate architecture program in Rome, he said he had one condition: that former student Stephen Harby share the post. Each summer for ten years with dozens of students in tow through the busy streets, the two have examined Rome inside out, inspiring and making beautiful watercolors of its architectural wonders.
When Wendy Artin met Russ Gerard, she was already based in Rome, having set foot in her future husband’s travel bookshop and thus turned her own traveling into the ephemeral sort. Russ, formerly Associate Dean of Roger Williams School of Architecture, was delighted to show Wendy’s work in his new gallery, as years earlier he had brought his students to draw inspiration from her show at the Boston Public Library.
The following year while Stephen was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, he set out to look up the niece of his former colleague Robert Harper. It turned out that president of the Academy, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, was doing the same. The two joined forces and took turns lavishing upon Wendy, in her very small apartment, great kindness and support.
Recently, prominent Boston architect and talented landscape painter Jeremiah Eck came to Russ Gerard’s gallery to look upon the work of Wendy Artin. He reminisced about one of his first great teachers at Columbia who had been a major influence. Russ said “but here he is!” and presented him with his former professor Alec Purves, who had just written the brilliant introduction to the show’s catalogue.
As chance may have it, these six artists’ encounters have now provided us with this exhibition, NINE BY SIX.
ADNAN CHARARA - THE ARTIST AND HIS PROTOTYPES
September 24 - October 24, 2010
Gurari Collections’is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures and drawings by the artist Adnan Charara. Entitled The ARTIST AND HIS PROTOTYPES, the exhibition explores the reconfiguration of reclaimed and found artifacts from everyday life into humorous and poignant figurative assemblages. Whimsy and delight are currents that continue to be expressed in Charara’s work. This, notwithstanding, is juxtaposed by the social and cultural histories that the reclaimed objects exemplify. By presenting his sculptures as “personalities” Charara’s work “suggests narratives that speak of the human condition”.
Drawing upon his international background, Adnan Charara has evolved his uniquely descriptive point of view as a fine artist. Always seemingly playful at first sight, his work resonates with topical issues suggesting narratives that explore injustice, fear and anxiety, as well as resilience, adaptability and growth.. The reclaimed objects and bronze sculptures act as models or prototypes that provides the audience with new perspectives for reinterpretation. His drawings, based upon these artifacts, further these notions by juxtaposing his use of humor to make powerful statements with his art.
Adnan Charara has been recognized and collected by museums, institutional and corporate collections as well as private collections. His artwork has been written about in international and nationally acclaimed journals and magazines.
SCOTT TULAY - DIMENSIONAL/TRANSPARENCIES
May 7 - 30, 2010
Gurari Collections is pleased to present an exhibition of work-on-paper by the artist Scott Tulay. Entitled DIMENSIONAL/TRANSPARENCIES, the exhibition investigates the ambiguity of space. Whether inspired by built form or natural context his art is constructed by an armature of light. Light is engaged in defining space, which also possesses a transmission quality – movement of light in space. Scott Tulay is especially attuned to exploring this relationship. With training and practice in fine art and architecture he tries to push his work, rendering up imagined graphic geometries of the manmade, yet, applying the deftness of a painter’s sensibility. Employing perspective skillfully, Tulay engages us by layering the dimensional space ambiguously. Prismatic and hurried light beckons us to read the work cinematically. Conversely, a haunting almost ghosting sensation pervades other work where one can hear a silence of space.
VICO FABBRIS
April 2 - May 2, 2010
Gurari Collections is pleased to present an exhibition of watercolor paintings and work-on-paper by the artist Vico Fabbris. Entitled FLORALIES, the exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of fantasy botanicals. In an era where environmental concerns are paramount, Vico Fabbris is especially attuned to the loss of nature and it’s delicate species – flowers. He attempts to replace the lost habitat with botanical “flights of fantasy”. In so doing, he delights the eye by creating the “almost real” as well as the satirical and absurd. Whether engaged by an imagined context, by a supporting story, or alone in mid-air suspension, his artwork is exuberant and a celebration of the inventive mind.
FLORALIES presents us new species of plant life with an artist created latin genus for each. Inferences of historical antecedents are implied in the watercolors and work-on-paper reminding us that discoveries of exotic flora and fauna were delighting nobility and informing scientific inquiry during the centuries of continental exploration. As if drawing his sources from the medieval through the baroque to the present, Vico Fabbris creates his botanical world with attention to detail and the flourish of the brush. His work exemplifies the loss of our natural habitat by engaging us with the pleasure of his fancy.
WENDY ARTIN
COLUMNAE - watercolor paintings
November 24 - December 20, 2009
COLUMNAE, Artin’s upcoming show of watercolors at Gurari Collections, features 60 paintings of architectural columns and landscapes from Rome’s ancient history, a selection of sanguine nudes both male and female, statuary, as well as still life watercolor paintings - birds, lemons and more.
Regarding the title of this exhibition, COLUMNAE, according to Marcus Vitruvius Pollo, (80 –15 BC.), in De Architectura,
“All these should possess strength, utility, and beauty. Strength arises from carrying down the foundations to a good solid bottom, and from making a proper choice of materials without parsimony. Utility arises from a judicious distribution of the parts, so that their purposes be duly answered, and that each have its proper situation. Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other”.
If strength and utility are absolutes in the built form, then beauty is the result of these conditions creating, defining and participating in context. Wendy Artin has been living, breathing in, and painting in Rome and the Campagna over the last fifteen years. In so doing, she has experienced her art in the pulsations of light, shade, and shadow that this city, and this country of civilization, renders. Living daily with the sites, the sounds and all the senses at play, she paints a history in the present that transcends time.
As Wendy Artin observes in the following thoughts –
“ Hot stones, sounds of crickets, great stillness, sun revealing forms and shadows like puddles of clear watercolor. A gust of wind brings gentle wafts of sun-baked plants, the same wind that for centuries has gradually worn away and rounded off the architectural shapes that seem eternal, in their great immobility. This is what stimulated me, the current magic world of architecture created in an ancient past.” Wendy Artin, 2009
Whether inert as in architecture, or in the movement of the live figure, Wendy Artin deftly captures the essence of its being through mastery of the painter’s hand and the timelessness that her innate ability conveys.
Wendy Artin's Website
T. KELLY WILSON
INQUIRIES - Recent Work - Oil Painting, Graphite Drawing. After many years of plein air painting INQUIRIES has brought the artist into the studio to study, to deconstruct, to obtain space, light, and color from an honored begonia plant. As the exhibition will demonstrate, Kelly Wilson is facile in the analytic and expressive in the nature of painting. Wilson's work resonates with the color coding of space and the making of dimensional planer surfaces that are warped by the life and age of this plant. Since his inquiry covered a lengthy time span, the investigation measures the begonia's own changes and morphology. The subsequent paintings and drawings reveal, and pleasure the senses.
MOLLIE GOLDSTROM
In her chosen mediums of intaglio and drawings, Mollie Goldstrom attempts to portray the “ambiguous space between opposing states of existence”. Referenced sources are popular folklore, personal myth, current events and environmental issues. Her work conveys a sense of whimsy while contending with allegorical, socio-political, and metaphysical challenges.
LEON STEINMETZ
STEINMETZ held solo shows at Gurari Collections in 2004 and 2006. His latest solo exhibit was at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in
Moscow, Russia (December 2009—January 2010.)
http://leonsteinmetz.com/ContemplatingGogol/Pushkin_MFA_Moscow_Russia/
Steinmetz’ works are in the permanent collections of many renowned museums: The British Museum in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Russia, among others. His artist books are in the rare books collections of New York and Boston public libraries, in rare books libraries of Harvard, Princeton and Columbia Universities, and in numerous rare books libraries across the country.
For more information, visit: http://www.leonsteinmetz.com
Collections in this category: WENDY ARTIN | MOLLIE GOLDSTROM | SCOTT TULAY | VICO FABBRIS | KEN GOLDSTROM | 