Rella Stuart-Hunt and Craig Manister

The Painting Center is pleased to present Rella Stuart-Hunt, Painting Poems and Craig Manister: Recent Black and White Paintings in the Main Gallery from February 26–March 22, 2008.

Rella Stuart-Hunt, born in England, has been living and working in New York since 1969. She describes her work as following in the tradition of non-objective painting and deriving from a directly felt response to her poetry. Her poems, through their exploration of visual sensory experiences, help her to bridge the gap between her aesthetic and semantic ideas in painting. Stuart-Hunt has shown at Condeso/Lawler, Neo Persona, Northside Arts Industries, and A.I.R., as well as the Project Room of The Painting Center, where she is currently a member. She received a BA in Art History and an MA in Art from Hunter College.

Craig Manister’s paintings are borne in the tradition of abstraction maintaining a strong sense of surface and expansion. Structure within the painting is found during the act of painting and allows the paint its own authority. Recent paintings, executed in black and white, use landscape to contextualize abstract forms. The forms, based on the keyhole, function as surrogates for the human figure. A member of The Painting Center, Craig Manister has exhibited widely including such venues as the National Academy Museum, Beijing Art Institute, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Staten Island Museum, and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. He attended the New York Studio School and earned an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College.