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Three one-person exhibitions
ROMOLO DEL DEO “Unbound”, large-scale drawings and bronze sculpture
BRENDA HOROWITZ “Dreaming Landscapes”, recent paintings
SELINA TRIEFF “Connecting to Self”, recent paintings
ROMOLO DEL DEL
Our bounds are wrapped in clouds
Sometimes in feathers
Some feathers are cords and
All cords can be broken.
-Romolo Del DeoAngels have been appearing in Western art since as early as 600 A.D., but not in the modern existential sense of Romolo Del Deo’s new bronze sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Here we have not the sweet cherubim or fiery messengers offering heavenly options of salvation or doom with entreating arms and standard issue wings, but dramatic “Mangels” as Del Deo refers to them, armless and with genitalia.
Mysterious and anonymous, classically modeled winged male figures (da Vinci’s drawings come to mind), they are grappling with a core issue of the human condition: within struggle our existence is defined, even empowered (Del Deo’s reference to Michelangelo’s “Slaves”). Admittedly, Del Deo likes “working with loaded images.” These wings refer to the transformative symbology of the concept of Angel: the potential for self-enacted liberation from “our limitations, anything that ties us down,” as Del Deo explains.
A modernist in Renaissance clothing, Del Deo’s “Mangels” are reminiscent of the anti-heroes in many modern American novels (Roth comes to mind), and his work continues this tradition, adding to its development in the plastic arts. By utilizing a very Renaissance medium and technique - lost wax process cast bronze - for a very modern message: that the Self embodies our own hell and heaven; Del Deo is a true modernist, albeit with a very classical aesthetic. (It is difficult not to want to make comparisons with Blake’s drawings and the text of Dante’s “Inferno,” or even “the Bard”) But, the viewer needs to see this for her/himself.
These are “flawed individuals,” not striving for the classical ideal of perfection, but to make meaning out of what Life contains at times, what binds us: chaos, loss, disruption, etc., that ”inherent in capture is the possibility for freedom, for escape.”
Del Deo's work has always been about transformation. His fragmented and distressed classical figures, beautiful and elegiac in their brokenness are images that examine the bridge between the past and present, between what lasts and what falls away, what is transformed in the processor art making, what begins anew.
This exhibition offers us perhaps Del Deo’s most personal show (he describes it as “very autobiographical“), and in the process reveals what has been true in Art in the modern age: what is authentically personal is also truly Universal.
Romolo Del Deo, is a native of Provincetown, son of painter Salvatore Del Deo, and environmentalist, writer, & art historian, Josephine Del Deo. He took his first sculpture course the summer he was 15 at CastleHill Center for the Arts in Truro, studying under Joyce Johnson. "As soon as I picked up the clay, I felt like it was what I was meant to do," he says. When he was 18, he traveled to Pietrasanta, Italy where he was able to focus on marble carving and bronze casting as apprentice to Rino Ginannini, Professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Carrara, Italy. He received a scholarship to pursue his education at Harvard Collegewhere he studied under sculptor Dimitri Hadzi. His sculpture has won numerous awards and grants; including from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Gottleib Foundation, Sugarman Foundation, National Sculpture Society, and a national sculpture award, juried by George McNeil in 1986 for Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Del Deo is currently working on a monumental commission for the Masterworks Museum of Fine Arts in Bermuda and recently completed a major commission for a sculpture park in Newport News,Virginia. He was also commissioned to create and install the front doors of a Church in Orleans, MA. His work is included in many private and public collections, including Adams House at Harvard College, Newport News Public Art Foundation, The Andalusia Museum, PA., the Municipal Artistic Archives in Carrara, Italy, the Museum of Outdoor Sculpture in Fannano, Italy, La Stamperia in Rome Italy and Smith College Museum of Fine Arts in Northhampton, MA. Del Deo has exhibited continuously with the Berta Walker Gallery since it opened seventeen years ago.
BRENDA HOROWITZ
Brenda Horowitz presents the familiar environment in astonishing freshness, vibrating with bold energy and intense pigment, vivid and expressive, the view pared down to essential elements – color, line and form. She distills color to such concentration, such saturation, that one can almost hear it. Her compositions, simplified to land, water, sky, sometimes a house, explore the inherent character of the Cape landscape, where the quality of light reflected by the ocean intensifies the color of nature. "I always loved landscapes," Horowitz says, "From the age of 14, I was painting landscapes."
The work in this exhibition was created en plein air in the hills, dunes, ponds and marshland where Horowitz spends her summer days, working quickly in acrylics or with gouache on paper to capture the ephemeral colors of the landscape. It was in 1982, on a trip to Jamaica, that Horowitz began painting outdoors using gouache on paper. It has become her signature medium for paper works. Her continuing focus on the outer Cape landscape has allowed Horowitz to develop a deep understanding of the land, water, sky, and the relationships among them; and it this relationship, and her own intense emotional response to the place that Horowitz is painting. Like Matisse, Horowitz finds the color that fits her sensation.
Brenda Horowitz studied with Hans Hofmann in both Provincetown and New York. Her paintings are a testament to her brilliant amalgamation of Hofmann's genius, his theories of color, plane, and movement, and her own unique visual language. In his lectures, Hofmann quoted Paul Cezanne saying, "All lies in contrast." Horowitz has taken this lesson into her painter's toolbox, creating enlivening contrasts as she searches for the colors that express her experience of the landscape: the heat and light, the burning dunes, the deep shade, cool water, golden grasses. Where color meets color, the hues are magnified in contrast, becoming abstract shapes moving back and forth in the picture plane. The canvas is animated with color.
And so is the viewer's imagination, as arts writer Rosalind Smith has noted, saying Horowitz's paintings "take me over the high roads on a journey of pure pleasure. Her paintings are a romantic blend of sky, the land and the water and capture the feeling of summer." Cate McQuaid of The Boston Globe describes her experience of Horowitz's painting similarly: “The artist creates a rhythm of hot and cool colors as well as a rhythm of textures – metal smooth undercut with the buzz of deft brushwork. The result is breathless and ripe, more like a dream of summer than summer itself.”
Horowitz was presented in a one-person exhibition at Adirondack Community College,Queensbury, NY. Gallery Director W. Sheldon Hurst visited Provincetown, saw Horowitz's work on exhibit in the Berta Walker Gallery and was so impressed, he immediately scheduled the exhibition, purchasing one of the paintings from the show. Hurst states in the exhibit catalogue that the impact of Horowitz's paintings is "due to Ms. Horowitz's trust in the personal experience, a mine she has learned to explore with a sensitivity and confidence that results in many finds."
As well as studying with Hans Hofmann, Brenda Horowitz also studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, City College of New York. She studied drawing with Sam Adler at New YorkUniversity. She has been painting for nearly fifty years and has exhibited widely since 1965. She has been presented in one-person exhibitions at Berta Walker Gallery; Atlantic Gallery, New York; Swansborough Gallery, Wellfleet; Provincetown Group Gallery; Arkin Galleries, San Francisco; and Westbeth Gallieries, New York. Group exhibitions include Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Anita Shapolsky Gallery, NYC; Brooklyn Museum, Hansen Gallery, NYC; and Munson Gallery, Chatham, MA. Horowitz's work is in many private collections and numerous corporate collections, including NYNEX Corporation, NYC; Rolls Royce, Inc. CT; Teamsters Local, Yonkers, NY; General Mills, NYC; Memphis Plaza, TN; American Express, NYC; Grand Hyatt Hotel, NYC; Environmental Associates, Los Angeles, CA, Boston Metropolitan Life; Colgate Co., NYC; Citibank, NYC.
SELINA TRIEFF
Selina Trieff’s recent paintings are accomplished with characteristic bravura, despite the artist’s increased frailty. Compositions keep to two or three figures or single heads, “each one stamped with the artist’s own features like identical funeral masks,” wrote Maureen Mullarkey recently in The New York Sun. Continuing, Mullarkey wrote:
Selina Trieff uses color for the exhilaration of it, creating opulent friezes that whisper of mortality. A student of Hans Hofmann’s school in the 1950s, Ms. Trieff has gone her own way, ignoring the realist path of most other figurative painters. Her life’s work is a metaphorical, painterly cosmos that unsettles and delights at the same time.
"an American original" by New York Times art critic John Russell, Trieff generates allusively gripping figurative compositions, abstract images in oil & gold leaf, richly pensive, introspective, strangely self-like. The subjects distilled to their essence in rich fields of color, reveal an entrenched passion for the push/pull technique of painting she first learned from Hans Hofmann. Trieff goes back to the same format in her work, but each return is a very different experience, an ongoing meditation of the human spirit through color and paint.
Trieff creates deep passages of beautiful emptiness on her canvases. Her use of color is luminous and jewel-like, bringing to mind medieval stained glass windows and early Renaissance alter pieces. The gold leaf evokes the heightened spiritual presence in religious iconography. Her formally arranged figures are poised in a moment laden with private emotion. Always reserved, they possess a formality that seems to offer them emotional distance, safety. Still, they call to the viewer from that distance. The work is the center, so to speak, the point of meeting in a relationship with the audience, a three-pronged relationship -- the painter, the figure, and the viewer. "The figures are guarded, but they are also vulnerable," Trieff says. Like the artist in the harsh world of earthly experience, they are archetypal pilgrims wandering, searching for a home place.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Selina Trieff studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College, and Morris Kantor at The Art Students League. Of her early experience at Brooklyn College the artist has said: "From Reinhardt and Rothko I learned that art is a philosophical exploration and that art making involves a mysterious process of self-discovery."
Trieff and painter husband Robert Henry spend summers in Wellfleet and winters in their nativeBrooklyn. Both teach at FAWC, PAAM, and Castle Hill. Trieff's work has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe, and is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum, Kalamazoo Art Institute, Bayonne Jewish Center, Snite Center at Notre Dame, Citibank, New York Public Library, Best Products, and Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She is represented in New York by the George Billis Gallery and the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Trieff was the subject of a major exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California and received a catalog grant for that exhibition from the Richard Florsheim Art Foundation. She has been represented by Berta Walker for over 20 years, ever since Walker presented Trieff her in her first one-person exhibition at Graham Modern Gallery in 1985. In the summer of 2007, Trieff will receive a one-person of exhibition in Provincetown’s newly renovated and expanded Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
FUTURE EXHIBITIONS: August 25 – September 10, 2006. Three one-person exhibitions for VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN, PENELOPE JENCKS, and PAUL RESIKA.
September 15 – October 8, 2006: ANNE MAC ADAM, ROSS MOFFETT, and Diptychs/Triptychs/Poliptychs, mixed media group exhibition.