Writing Samples
Sample 1:
For Immediate Release:
Gallery Sonja Roesch is pleased to announce a new exhibition, “No Paint”.
The show consists of six artists whose work is based on shared painterly concepts, yet do not use actual paint. What unites all these artists is their use of pigment, whether it is found, industrial, or unsupported, and their use of their materials to explore three painting fundamentals: the mystery of nature, light and color.
Regine Schumann constructs simple boxes and tubes from industrial materials. Her florescent Plexiglas is machine-made yet transcends its origin to emit a mysterious glow. The curving forms in this show are color and light contained by three-dimensional geometry.
August Muth also uses machine processes and materials to explore light and color. Yet unlike Schumann’s geometric pieces, his squares of light and color are entirely flat. To make his holograms, he lasers glass with surgical precision, so no human touch is visible. As the squares recede or advance according to the position of the viewer, they recall Josef Albers and Modernist color theory. The entire piece can dilate like an iris, summarizing the optical experience of paint.
Harold Schmitz-Schmelzer submerges stripes of pigment in blocks of industrial resin. They resemble made-made geological layers of color. Sometimes they glow as if a living skin, as Schmitz-Schmelzer utilizes the support of his painting mediums to encase hazily floating color.
Mario Reis, also submerges his paintings, but in nature, in order to find color. He tethers untreated, stretched canvas into river beds all over the world. The results are a variety of pigments and accumulated sediments. They flow from the landscape tradition of painting in that they are specific to the place and they are a record of time passed. The result is illuminated by water, making them the conceptual offspring of Monet’s haystacks, as the mystery of color and nature are intertwined.
Texas artist Hills Snyder approaches beloved painting iconography with humor. He uses a playful color palette and takes painting off the support and onto the wall itself. The multi-color Eiffel tower made of teacups is an instantly recognizable collection of silhouettes. In one swoop he pokes fun at a beloved bourgeois symbol of civilization, an icon of the Industrial Revolution, and the City of Light itself, Paris.
Aldo Chaparro also uses industrial materials with a human variable and pop culture references. He starts with sheets of steel and crumples them into shapes that reflect chance and the artist’s hand. The results are like punk rock flowers, bursting with intense color. Or, like the media world that inspires him, a slick, silvery non-color that reflects only the color of the environment.
All deal with color and light, by using industrial, non-conventional, or found materials. They operate on foundations of paint, and what it does to the eye. By using “No Paint”, they expand the definition of “paint”.
Sample 2:
Proposal for Exhibition:
The Laocoön Effect: The Heroic Body in the Work of Michelangelo and Rubens.
Exhibition Place and Date: Baltimore Museum of Art, Feb 1-May 30
Description:
The eight years (1600-1608) that Rubens spent in Italy were formative ones. There he absorbed the influences of contemporary and past Italian painters and eagerly copied the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that had inspired previous artists. This exhibition focuses on two particular influences Rubens encountered in Italy: the Laocoön and Michelangelo. These influences on Rubens and his portrayal of the human body were crucial. Michelangelo was one of the first artists to take in the muscular, writhing figures in the Laocoön sculpture, a Hellenistic sculpture rediscovered and acquired by the Vatican in 1506. From there, Michelangelo was inspired to make energetic and heroic figures in his frescos on the ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel in 1508. One hundred years later, Rubens had the unique opportunity of seeing both the Sistine Chapel and the influential Laocoön sculpture that played such a pivotal role in the history of Renaissance art. Ruben’s drawings of both the Laocoön sculpture and the Sistine Chapel attest to the avid interest Rubens took in learning from the past. The muscular anatomy and serpentine poses he meticulously studied in Italy immediately affected his depiction of the figure and can be directly seen in a famous painting made after his return to Antwerp, The Raising of the Cross (1610-11).
Sample 3: