Press Release
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Opening June 14 and running through July 21, 2010 is an exhibition of recent work by Scott Zegar and Brian Murphy. Both are exhibiting for the first time in the NY metropolitan art market. The show explores the abstract and semi-abstract sensibilities in a very personal context and suggests a departure from the drought of conceptual art and a fountain of young vibrancy in the emerging art community these days. Scott Zegar is a native New Yorker who has come to painting late in his rather young life but has turned over his identity to it as though he never had a choice. Zegar begins in the abstract and allows the metamorphosis of light, color and texture dictate to his visual archive and then stands back and lets the painting take him, out of the darkness and into the light. His representation or rendering of form is somewhat traditional in its realization but is never tied down to a context of isolation usually assigned to form as in chiaroscuro; all is in continuity and balance. There are abstract qualities that suggest form and he does nothing to oppose its presence but he stays in the world of metaphor and that are his grace and identity. There is respect for the formal use of paint and unity of composition but there are constant challenges to anyone's predispositions of traditional pictorial process in this body of work. The spontaneity is emblematic of traditional abstraction but there is a groundedness that speaks of form and linear logic, yet the context is pure abstraction. This paradox is one we are all very familiar with; it is where our minds meet iour senses. Brian Murphy is a Tatoo artist. He has done this hard edged, representational work for many years and has acquired quite a following for that medium given his creative narratives and extravagant use of color, they line up for his imprints on their living canvases. Change the surface and change the demeanor of his metaphor. Murphy is anything but limited to the representational rendering of life and in this new body of work, he has set aside his audience's expectations for the sake of the personal and the vulnerable. The newest work by Brian Murphy is lyrical in the commingling of opaque's and transparencies as well as the balance between color intensities and pressures. He is studied in the relationships of these tools that identify his pure sensation in that they are not arbitrary though apparently circumstantial. Like a sunset they seem planned and organized much like a Cezanne still life when one sits with each composition the form begins to come alive with its intensities suggesting they live, they float, they rise above or off of the surface and find a new spatial tension in action and alive.
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday Noon to 6:00PM (or by appointment) |