Opening a World: Five Figurative Artists

Exhibition Dates: January 5 - 30, 2009

Reception: thursday, January 8, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center announces an exhibition of work by, Bruce Gagnier, Deborah Kahn, Thaddeus Radell, Mark LaRiviere and Simon Carr, titled Opening a World. The relationship between observation of the visual world and the world of painting and sculpture poses at first a gap, a disruption, and an insurmountable difference. What is seen and experienced in the world seems at once impossibly alien to representation, yet fundamentally motivates and energizes the artist and the work.

What is it that drives so insistently the creation of representational art? This exhibition explores the varied work of five artists, Bruce Gagnier, Deborah Kahn, Thaddeus Radell, Mark LaRiviere and Simon Carr. Comparing the worlds created by each of these artists we may gain insight into both the process of art-making (drawings, studies, larger works), and even more significantly insight into the profound ways their works seem to differ from commonly accepted experience. Yet the differences themselves lead to truths of that everyday experience, truths that resonate with artist and viewers alike. The show takes on the themes of the insistence of representation, (What brings us back again and again to represent the world of common experience?) through paintings, drawings and studies, hoping to trace the studio process from observation, through experience, to transformation into a world of painting and sculpture.