Gallery
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January 27 to March 3, 2007
No Coast, No Sea
Carl Baratta & Iva GueorguievaCarl and Iva's images are here
and
Paola Cabal: Luminaries
Paola images here
In our Main and Plus Galleries, we present, in a two-person show, "No Coast, No Sea", new paintings on paper, canvas and panel by Carl Baratta and Iva Gueorguieva. In the Drawing Room, we present a painting installation by Paola Cabal.
Carl Baratta and Iva Gueorguieva’s paintings share complicated feelings of sadness, humor, death, and isolation as they depict physical and psychological bodies under stress. Baratta, from Chicago and Gueorguieva, from Los Angeles, are longtime friends who find common formal and conceptual ground in lurid color, bizarre spatial configurations and elegant pictorial violence.
Carl Baratta, Float Down, 2006
Carl Baratta’s wildly colorful, pathos-drenched paintings depict imaginative worlds in moments of constant transition, creating a tension between static images and dynamic narratives. Drawing on popular film genres (Martial Arts, Samurai, Yakusa and Kung-Fu), as well as Persian miniature court painting, European illuminated manuscripts and English glam rock fashion, Baratta’s paintings are often bloody and violent depictions of war and strife. Key to Baratta’s work is the compression of multiple events and moments into a single scene, a common conceit of manuscript paintings. His dramatic spatial shifts, violent color palette, mismatched characters and exotic landscapes create a sense of mystery and wonder, leading the viewer on an irresolvable quest.
Iva Gueorguieva, Trugni-Butni, 2006In Iva Gueorguieva’s large, turbulent, seemingly abstract paintings, vertiginous strokes ascend and twist into a flurry of sharp-edged calligraphic marks that tell different stories, some epic, others comic and absurd. By bleeding abstraction into narrative, she draws attention to the process of painting itself. She uses recurrent characters--a two-headed fat lady with extraordinary reproductive powers, a two-headed beast whose two ends perpetually pull him in opposite directions--along with nude pink innocents, gas-masked rabbits, erect penises and gaping mouths. These characters draw out and thematize the real power relationships underlying abstract gesture.
This is Carl Baratta’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions. Recent solo shows include “Hurt to Death” at the Contemporary Art Workshop in 2006 (which was reviewed in Time Out Chicago), and “Pulling Rabbits Out of Hats” at J2 Gallery in Tokyo, Japan in 2005. Group shows include Roots and Culture, Western Exhibitions, G2, all in Chicago and the Sara Nightengale Gallery in New York. Carl Baratta received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently resides in Chicago.
Iva Gueorguieva has an upcoming solo show with Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles in 2007. Other solo shows include Stefan Stux Gallery in NYC in 2006 and Draka Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2003 and her work has been included in group shows at Triple Candie, Massiomo Audiello Gallery, Alona Kagan Gallery, all in NYC, Angell Gallery in Toronto, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Art Papers and the Times Picayune. Iva received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia on 2000 and her residencies include Kaus Australis in Rotterdam and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Paola Cabal: Luminaries
Paola Cabal, Luminaries (detail), 2006-7
Three large windows make up the east wall of Western Exhibitions’ rear gallery (called the Drawing Room). On a typical day in the winter, we get about one hour worth of direct sunlight coursing through these windows, so we asked installation artist Paola Cabal to capture these sunrays to lighten our mood through the dark hibernation months. Paola completed her work on December for an installation that will run through March 3.
Paola calls her pieces ‘interventions’: The work is created on-site and takes its cues from elements inherent to said space. She ‘intervenes’ into the space in alternately obvious and subtle ways, yet maintaining the unique properties of the site. The play of both sunlight and street-light on, and through, built structures constitutes the focus of many of her interventions as she ‘fixes’ sunlight to the floors and walls of her sites by spray painting the shadow’s cast patterns. The result is what is illuminated when light falls in a built space, and then what remains after that light fades. Cabal says, “…it is static work, work that exists in space and evokes time, which has the power to reveal aspects of our constantly shifting lived experience.”
During the opening reception, Gisela Insuaste and Sumakshi Singh will participate in a one-time performance, interacting with the painted sunlight installation by Paola Cabal. Sitting still or moving within the altered space, Insuaste and Singh will be similarly modified to reflect a particular time and sunlight condition: from alterations to their bodies to modifications to their clothing, Insuaste and Singh will appear to reflect lighting conditions not necessarily present when viewers experience the piece.
Paola Cabal is the 2006 recipient of the Individual Artist Award: Emerging Artist from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Her interventions have been seen locally at Northern Illinois University Chicago gallery, Gallery 312, Polvo and the Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art. In an on-going, multi-site piece “Points of Passage” sponsored by Gallery 400, she preserves sunlight patterns in painted reverse shadows as they are reflected onto public spaces throughout the city of Chicago. Her work has been included in shows in Bogota, Colombia, Pittsburgh, Ft. Lauderdale and South Carolina. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and lives and works in Chicago.
ALL IMAGES © WESTERN EXHIBITIONS & EACH INDIVIDUAL ARTIST