Artist Reviews – Reviews of our Exhibition

Alex Braverman’s Brave New World

The richly layered simultaneity of urban streets is dramatically evoked in photographer Alex Braverman’s series “New York City 2014: Synchronicity.” “Photography is about what doesn’t meet the eye,” says Braverman, and he brings out another element of this idea in his photographs which capture dancers in motion, a subject he sometimes merges with his cityscapes Read More

Discovering the Painterly Versatility of Allan Raider

Few artists have a style that adopts itself equally well to figurative and abstract compositions as that of Allan Raider, whose creative talent was recognized early, when he was presented with the St. Gaudens art medal by President Lyndon Johnson while he was still in high school. After graduation he studied architecture and fine arts Read More

The Hybrid Visions of Surrealist Anis Dargaa

Like his fellow countryman René Magritte, the doubly gifted painter and sculptor Anis Dargaa, born in Liège, Belgium, in 1972, is a Surrealist fascinated with intriguing incongruities. However, Dargaa’s imagistic anomalies, rather than being centered on objects of the ordinary world skewed slightly out of synch, are of a wholly phantasmagorical nature. And for this Read More

Social Commentary Meets Beauty in the Art of Anti Liu

Perhaps the best introduction to the art of Anti Liu, a Taiwanese sculptor now living in Long Island, is his terracotta figure “ Terracotta Marilyn Monroe.” We all know the pose: It’s based on that iconic picture of the blond screen goddess standing on a subway grate with her skirt billowing up around her thighs. Read More

The Sensate Surface as Visceral Topology in the Paintings of Biddy Hodgkinson

The British painter Biddy Hodgkinson takes her inspiration from a close observation of life cycles, with particular focus on plants and molds. Her relationship with nature began during her childhood, growing up on a farm, where keeping animals, some of which the family ate, taught her early on about the law of survival of the Read More

Bill Dixon: Versatility in the Abstract

He’s all over the place,” some might say of Bill Dixon’s art, and not realize that they would be paying this artist, who moves easily between painting by hand in the traditional manner and working on a computer, a compliment. Yes, Dixon is, indeed, all over the place in the best possible way. For whether Read More

Carlo Proietto: Conundrums Cloaked in a Pristine Aesthetic

Carlo Proietto has written two exhaustively researched books on pyrography, rescuing the technique of burning images into wood or fabric with a heated instrument from the misperception of being “a relatively minor art form,” establishing once and for all that it is, as he puts, “comparable to any art form.” It is in his own Read More

The Equine Photography of Carol J. Walker

From artists of the French Romantic period like Gericault and Delacroix to the famous 18th century British painter of horses George Stubbs, the idealized equine figure has been such a ubiquitous part of art history that one might easily mistake the images of the Colorado-based photographer Carol J. Walker for paintings –– especially since they Read More

Cathy Garceran: Art in the Face of Adversity

As Chuck Close proved when he accomplished arguably some of the best paintings of his career after suffering a devastating spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair and made it necessary for his brushes to be strapped to his hands in order for him to work, overcoming adversity sometimes strengthens an artist’s commitment. “When Read More

Felicities of Form and Touch in the Paintings of Cecilia Fernandez Q

Because she began as a sculptor, the Chilean painter Cecilia Fernandez Q came first to form. Color followed in due time: subtle and refined combinations of complementary secondary and earthy hues that define, without being subordinated to exquisitely drawn human and animal figures informed by an underlying sense of abstraction. Because drawing, the bare bones Read More

Chantal Westby’s Paintings Project an Epic Grandeur

The Italian phrase ‘di sotto in su’, which means “looking up from below,” is a device for creating spatial allusions via severe foreshortening, and is often seen in the ceiling frescos of Andrea Mantegna and other Renaissance masters but is rarely encountered in the work of contemporary artists. Chantal Westby, a French painter who moved Read More

Charles Conrardy is Adamant About Abstraction

While a conservative artist once dismissed painting abstractly as being “like playing tennis without a net,” Charles Conrardy, a former painter of realistic landscapes, regards nonobjective art as liberating and exhilarating. In fact, he maintains that an absence of obstruction is what it’s actually all about! “A sunrise is already perfect, cannot be replicated, so Read More

Christine Sellman and the Character of an Authentic Gesture

Once our stereotype of Australian painting was the rough and ready yet slyly sophisticated folkloric faux-primitivism of Sidney Nolan, one of the country’s most famous artists. But in actual fact there are all manner of innovative painters at work today in Australia, where one of the most impressive exponents of what Clement Greenberg once chauvinistically Read More

Clara Gràcia: The Emotive Power of Nature

It has been noted elsewhere that while the Catalan artist Clara Gràcia often works on large canvases, her style is more lyrical than aggressive and does not tend to intimidate the viewer, as big paintings sometimes can. Indeed, standing before one of her paintings, the viewer is enveloped in effusions of color and light that Read More

Clive Rowe: Possible Prophet of a “Terrible Beauty”

Even an artist engaged with state-of-the-art new media must be beholden to a tradition, in order to sustain a sophisticated and consciously avant garde aesthetic practice. Or so Clive Rowe, a lifelong photographer presently experimenting with manipulating his own images by means of computer technology, seems to imply, in a lengthy artist statement that sheds Read More

Out of Shadow: The Dramatic Digital Photography of Denis Palbiani

The use of chiaroscuro, starkly contrasting light and shadow in painting, was perfected by Caravaggio, the most powerful and original Italian artist of the 17th century. He had an enormous influence on other painters who came to be called “Caravaggesque,” including the French artist Georges de La Tour, known for his nocturnal scenes with candles Read More

Dick Perez is a Major League Baseball Painter

As Dick Perez points out in an artist’s statement issued for his solo exhibition at Agora Gallery, art inspired by baseball has a long and honorable history. Indeed, this is the go-to show if you think sports painting began and ends with the slick Playboy illustrator LeRoy Neiman who gives each picture the same gaudy Read More

Did Dontzoff Paints the Human Image in the Raw

Born in Paris of Russian, Jewish, and Gypsy origins, Did Dontzoff is a painter with his own unique vernacular, which can only be described as a sophisticated variant on Dubuffet’s “art brut,” seasoned by the streets in much the same manner as the poetry of Jacques Prévert and the songs of Charles Azvenour. For while Read More

Lyricism and Freedom in the Art of Dominique Boutaud

Although Dominique Boutaud, who was born in Nice, France, became an American citizen in 2008, she remains a French painter in the very best sense of the term. Which is to say: her work has a sense of finesse and a love of beauty that harks back to the glory days of the School of Read More

Discovering the Abstract Naturalism of Donna Shaffer

Donna Shaffer paints compositions inspired by nature in colored inks on paper and board as though with a brush dipped in liquid light. At the same time, she admits, “I have never felt that an artist can improve on nature, but I have always tried to interpret, through my work, how nature presents itself to Read More

Eduard Anikonov and the Souls of Machines

Like the American artist Walter Murch, active in the 1950s and 60s, Eduard Anikonov is a “painter’s painter,” in that his work has as much to do with light and shadow, color and texture, and the tactile qualities of oil paint applied to canvas as with the subjects that he depicts. But while Murch often Read More

Geometry Becomes a Universal Language in the Paintings of Russian Artist Elena Kozhevnikova

In her new paintings, Elena Kozhevnikova transforms the wide open spaces of the Russian landscape in which she grew up into tightly organized compositions, suggesting a more fluidly allusive contemporary update of Constructivism. Kozhevnikova’s complex approach to color can be seen in her acrylic on canvas “Random Thoughts I,” where compartmentalized geometric forms are overlaid Read More

Muscovite Painter Elena Shorokhova-Gayun Honors a Tradition Spanning Many Centuries

To paraphrase W. Bruce Lincoln, author of “The Romanovs,” Russia is a land uniquely suspended between East and West, past and future. So many of us who grew up in the States during the Cold War period were so preoccupied by the political implications of this rival Superpower as to be woefully unaware of its Read More

Felix Semper’s Dynamic Humanist Vision

Felix Semper, who was born in Havana Cuba, has lived in both Spain and the United States, and now resides in north Carolina, is an artist with remarkably fluid draftsmanlike abilities, which shine through his paintings as well as his drawings. Line is his natural instrument, regardless of what medium he may be employing in Read More

Color and Emotion in the Visual Music of Francesco Ruspoli

ome of our most memorable and enduring artists are those who evolve succinct symbols for our common humanity: Jean Dubuffet’s Everymen; Willem de Kooning’s monstrous Amazons; Leger’s robotic steel workers; Francis Bacon’s cold meat couplers merging in protoplasmic blobs on beds as desolate of love as morgue slabs… The contemporary painter Francesco Ruspoli appears destined Read More

The Lyrical Linear Universe of Fred Mou

Line is the essence of form and a delineator of character, according to artists in Asian countries where calligraphy is regarded as an art form on a par with painting, and where its greatest exponents generally surpass the linear mastery of our best Western artists. Fred Mou, a Swiss architect-turned-artist trained at the Institute of Read More

Gabe Tong’s Paintings Reinvigorate the Formal Vocabulary of Cubism

Since Cubism originally had all to do with exploiting the flatness of objects and forms on the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, the phrase “3D” cubism could seem a contradiction in terms –– that is, until one encounters the paintings of an intrepid and innovative Chinese-American artist named Gabe Tong. Tong, who was born Read More

Discovering the African Portraits of Gaby Hahn

Gaby Hahn, an artist originally from Germany, spends part of each year in Africa, painting the people of Northern Kenya and Southern Ethiopia. Coming to painting late in life, she paints in a studio that sometimes serves as a school for African children that she established as part of her life mission. Her oils capture Read More

George Oommen’s Homeward Journey to the Center of Self

It was once verboten for abstract painters to admit that their work was “about” anything in particular. However, the permissiveness of the postmodern era has done away with the sterile notion that nonobjective painting must be discrete unto itself; about nothing but form and color. It is doubtful that George Oommen, a painter and architect Read More

Gerd Rautert: A German Expressionist’s Art of Indelible Archetypes

A monumental sense of modern dislocation in a world that has grown fragmented is what comes across most strongly in the large Expressionist works in acrylic and ink on canvas of Gerd Rautert, a German artist who states “I feel closer to myself and to God when I paint.” Rautert is a master markmaker, an Read More

Gustavo Rasso’s Painterly Approach to the Digital Print

The more one sees of digital art the clearer it becomes that some of its most impressive practitioners are those who were trained in drawing and painting before they took up the new medium. One excellent example of this can be seen in the work of Gustavo Rasso, an artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Read More

Henri Guéguen: Pop with a Noble Purpose

While Don Flavin, Forrest Myers and other artists have employed neon tubes to create light sculptures, the French painter Henri Gu�guen may be the first to use their unlikely surface as one would a canvas. Gu�guen’s enamel portrait tribute to the late Lady Diana on a row of nineteen such tubes mounted close together is Read More

Ines de Poligny’s Harmonious Blend of Freedom and Precision

An Argentinean artist of mixed French and Russian extraction, Ines de Poligny states her artistic mission as an attempt “to express opposites coexisting,” and “to express nature’s qualities, bringing my own abstract vision to it.” Perhaps de Poligny’s most overtly nature-derived painting, due to its horizontal format and the sense of a rugged terrain that Read More

Ivanrod: Beyond Minimalism

Born in Bogota, Columbia, Ivan Rodriguez Saboya, who is known as a painter by the mononym of Ivanrod, demonstrates auspiciously John Powson’s excellent definition of minimalism: “the perfection that an artifact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve it by subtraction.” Yet, at the same time, Ivanrod inscribes some of his ostensibly minimalist Read More

The Happy Marriage of Freedom and Formal Strength in the Paintings of Jennifer Morrison

Although she has lived and worked in London for the past two decades, Jennifer Morrison was born in Durban, South Africa, which still informs her paintings. “Durban has a sub-tropical climate with lush foliage which is still a source of inspiration,” she said in a recent artist’s statement. “ I visit about four times a Read More

Jenyshin’s Paintings Run the Gamut of Emotions

I love to express my feelings through color,” says the young Korean-born artist Jenny Shin, who paints under the sobriquet of Jenyshin. And indeed her palette is a chromatic keyboard of subtle hues, making every picture a veritable piano solo of her varied moods, ranging from the hopeful sweetness of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” to Read More

Josyane Martinez Practices Her Own Form of Imaginative Aesthetic Alchemy

The centerpiece of the French painter Josyane Martinez’s remarkable oil on canvas, “Hommage � Dali,” is the Surrealist master’s wife and favorite model Gala. Dali both idolized Gala and idealized her. Here, while her face is mature, her compact, unblemished nude body is that of an adolescent Venus. She stands like a living monument with Read More

Grace, Simplicity, and Humor: The Art of Kaneko Johkoh

My concept is ‘Simple and Natural,’” says Kanekoh Johkoh, a Japanese citizen now living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. “My aim is to express things as they are.” Employing the traditional materials of Sumi ink and a kind of Japanese rice paper called Washi, Johkoh has evolved a refreshingly contemporary style. As much as Read More

Kelly Hunt Probes the Secret Life of the Flower

A rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein, but one feels almost certain that Kelly Hunt would disagree. For in her large digital photographs of floral forms on canvas, Hunt makes clear that a rose –– and indeed any other species of flower –– can be ever so much more. Having grown Read More

Protest Meets Grandeur in the Art of Kiko Sobrino

The Brazilian artist Kiko Sobrino employs a number of techniques –– including acrylics, ink, serigraphy, and even computer graphics on canvas and wood –– to creates works that move fluently between the figurative and the abstract. Yet he is adamant in his insistence that “my formation is from the classical school of arts.” Thus, while Read More

The Concrete Epiphanies of Kozo Takano

As the delightfully ironic poems of Billy Collins make clear, verse that makes us smile is not always “light.” This point is also well demonstrated in visual terms in the paintings of Kozo Takano, an artist who currently lives and works in Yokohama, Japan, and states, “I am particularly influenced by the works of Picasso Read More

Nature is Transformed in the Paintings of L. Byrne

Contrary to the belief of strict formalists who would prefer to see it as a function of dispassionate aesthetic gamesmanship, abstract painting had its origins in mystery. For it was born when European modernist masters such as Kandinsky, and Malevich, influenced by Theosophy and other esoteric belief systems prevalent at the turn of the century, Read More

Fame is the New Immortality: Lady Gioconda’s Star-Studded Contemporary Icons

Contemporary celebrity portraiture takes many forms, usually photographic, ranging from the hit-and-run methods of paparazzi like Ron Galella to the elaborate and painstaking setup preparations of Annie Leibovitz, the diva of the genre, who lights and poses her subjects as though filming scenes in a feature-length film. Few photographers, however, achieve anything like the poetic Read More

Lydia van den Berg’s Paintings Filter Innocent Wonder Through Sophisticated Vision

Although the Bulgarian-born artist Lydia van den Berg, who now lives and works somewhere in the vicinity of Zurich, Switzerland, classifies her painting style as “Magical Poetic Realism,” it would not be inaccurate to add yet another descriptive word to that designation: “Visionary.” For imagination plays a very big part in how van den Berg Read More

MAEV: An Artist’s Reaffirmation of the Visionary Impulse

Rarely are subject and medium so seamlessly merged as in the paintings on copper of the doubly-gifted Quebec-based visual artist and musician MAEV (Maev Marchini) whose compositions are infused with a singularly ethereal sense of light. A visionary in the tradition of William Blake, MAEV abandoned oil painting for her unusual medium in the wake Read More

Mairi Budreau Turns the Female Gaze on the Nude Male Body

The Male Gaze was the term that art historians came up with to characterize the way male artists objectified female models down through the centuries. It was a provocative act of turnabout when Sylvia Sleigh started painting male nudes at the height of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Sleigh’s mural-scale oil on canvas “The Read More

Mexican Painter Marcela Cadena’s Vibrant Vision

From the evidence of the work to be seen in her upcoming exhibition at Agora Gallery in Chelsea, Marcela Cadena, who has already exhibited extensively and who was also featured at Art Shanghai in China earlier this year, is among the best and brightest of the present generation of young Mexican artists. Often working with Read More

Maria José Royuela: The Art of Reflection

”Patience” is a word one rarely hears in the hectic, ambitious art world of today, where everyone appears to be in a hurry to succeed, and where the work is often hurried in execution, serving as a mere accessory to that quest for success. For this reason it is refreshing to hear the Spanish painter Read More

On Encountering the Mysterious Primal Symbols of Marie Gailland

The work of the French artist Marie Gailland is full of surprises, due to her ability to combine the gestural energy of Neo-Expressionism with subject matter as unexpected as that of the most imaginative talents among the New Image School painters who emerged in the 1980s. What sets Gailland apart from either group, however, is Read More

The Paintings of Max Werner are Filled with Natural Imagery

Realism, Minimalism, and Surrealism may seem miles apart; but Max Werner, a painter and printmaker born in Belgium and currently living in the United States, is an artist who professes an interest in René Magritte, yet paints mostly landscapes. What aligns him with Minimalism is the spareness of his compositions, and as literally down to Read More

Discovering the Gritty Newcomer Michelle Louise

The story of the painter Michelle Louise is one of triumph over adversity. Three years ago, after leaving an abusive marriage, Louise found herself a single mother raising three children with no job, no bank account, and no car –– almost a necessity in a town like Sanford, Maine, where her family has lived for Read More

Mihai Bara’s Winning Confluence of Formal Thrust and Buoyant Vision

Painting is like second nature to me,” says the Romanian-born artist Mihai Bara, who has lived and worked in the small picturesque European principality of Andorra since 1992. “It is natural to think, breathe and to absorb vibrations and use them to recreate a different world while I paint, according to my point of view, Read More

Nada Herman, Scion of an Australian Art Dynasty

The granddaughter of Sali Herman, one of Australia’s most famous painters, Nada Herman grew up in an atmosphere that nurtured art and started painting in oils at age eight, sharing a studio with both her grandfather and her father, “TED,” also an accomplished and admired artist. Although her grandfather courted controversy by painting the slums Read More

Photographic Purist Nadine Levin’s Naked Eye

One thinks first of Andrew Wyeth, on seeing Nadine Levin’s Giclee print on canvas “Cottonwood Church.” What grabs you is the deadpan American gothic plainness of this image of a weathered wooden colonial structure, standing along a desolate country road, beside a gnarled tree, its bare black limbs clawing like arthritic fingers at a bare Read More

“Freedom” Personified: The Paintings of Nélida Diaz de D’Amato

In the series of paintings that she titles “The Drama of Being Free,” Latin American artist Nélida Diaz de D’Amato takes inspiration from the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. But rather than slavishly following Schelling’s themes, she demonstrates the principle of freedom in art by virtue of her creative interpretation. Read More

Nicole Alger: A Painter for the True New Age

New Age” is a term with a broad application, often encompassing a variety of multicultural disciplines that offer alternatives to the spiritual barrenness of modern life. Normally, when the term is applied to art, however, we picture images of unicorns, wizards, earth goddesses, fantastic landscapes in imaginary fairy tale realms, and other lighthearted, often banal Read More

Pat Fairhead: A Painter Who Goes with the Flow

Despite the accomplishments of its great modern exponents such as John Marin and Charles Burchfield, watercolor has yet to be acknowledged as the major medium that it can be when employed for finished works on a grand scale, rather than merely for sketches and studies. One artist in point is the Canadian painter Pat Fairhead, Read More

Charting Painter Paul M. Cote’s Lightning Ascent

Although he has only been painting for a relatively short period of time, Paul M. Cote, who signs his work “Cody,” has quickly established himself as something of an up-and-coming artistic enfant terrible, given his untrammeled ambition and the large scale and rugged aggressiveness of his Neo-Abstract Expressionist canvases.

Digital Photo Artist Peter Watson Paints with Light

With a little help from the viewers’ imagination, the allusiveness of abstract art can take an aural as well as visual turn. One early example is how the pioneering American modernist Arthur Dove magically combined forms and colors in his painting “Fog Horns” to evoke the mournful moans that haunted him on foggy nights in Read More

Gesture is Wedded to Emotion in Pierre Leclerc’s

Two gestural strains have long been present in French modernist art: automatic drawing, often influenced by Asian calligraphy as in the work of André Masson and Henri Michaux, and Tachisme, the European answer to Abstract Expressionists, also known as Art Informal. Both tendencies apparently assert themselves in the paintings of the contemporary artist Pierre Leclerc. Read More

Rieko Karrer: Zen in the Abstract

Born in 1952, Rieko Karrer grew up in a very traditional Japanese household. She fondly remembers the fragrance of incense in a Buddhist temple and taking lessons in calligraphy that, although she may not have predicted it at the time, would later prepare her for the fluid brushwork that distinguishes her art. She learned something Read More

Robert Oelman and the Art of Seeing

With the progress of digital technology many photographers have become preoccupied with aping aspects of painting. No doubt, digital imaging has provided us with exciting innovations and new directions in so-called “painterly photography.” At the same time, however, we have also seen a disheartening decrease in artful documentary photography. “What I am about is a Read More

Inspiration and Process Meld in the Paintings of Roberta Dixon

Roberta Dixon says that she imagined the very first brushstroke of her very first painting for almost thirty-five years before she actually began work on it. With that first stroke, however, it would appear that she opened a floodgate of spontaneous creativity. As she puts it, “With each painting comes a new beginning, infused with Read More

The Neo-Pointillism of Santina “Semadar” Panetta

At a heretofore little explored juncture where pointillism meets optical art and color field painting are the oils of Santina “Semadar” Panetta, an artist who was exposed to the classical arts in both her native Italy and Greece before migrating to Montreal, and who has staked out her own unique territory. Ostensibly, Panetta’s paintings are Read More

Scott Forsyth: Capturing the Land’s Grandeur

As Ansel Adams felt about the American landscape, particularly Yosemite Valley, the Canadian Photographer Scott Forsyth seems to feel about the entire terrain of his own native county. “I was born and raised in southern Ontario,” Forsyth, a family doctor/artist in the tradition of poet/physician William Carlos Williams, states, “along the shoreline of the Great Read More

The Sun-Drenched Passion of Sherry Sweet Tewell

Sherry Sweet Tewell is a mixed media artist who employs abstraction in a particularly allusive postmodern manner to create works that are brilliantly colorful and accessible, despite their often nonobjective compositions. A native of Kentucky, Tewell bravely migrated to Key West, Florida, several years ago. “After divorce, my children away in college, I decided it Read More

Sirenes: A Sublime Colorist Enamored of Light

As a little girl in kindergarten in Norway the artist known as Sirenes was fascinated with color. She loved the tactile sensation of putting her fingers in paint and applying it directly to the paper. And to this very day many of her large canvases are created entirely by finger-painting. These paintings in particular have Read More

Spanish Artist Sola: Neo-Constructivist 
Experiments in the Climate of Postmodernism

A professor of sculpture at the Art School in Seville, the Spanish artist Sola incorporates three-dimensional elements in her paintings that lend them a uniquely dynamic effect. Especially striking in this regard is the collage and mixed media composition that Sola calls “Connection V,” in which jaggedly elongated red shapes suggest stylized lightning bolts, as Read More

Stephen Tobin’s Whitmanesque Eye

When Newfoundlander Stephen Tobin, widely known as “The Wandering Photographer,” decided to call his solo exhibition “The Natural Instincts of Nature,” it is clear that he meant human nature, as well as the less animate elements of landscape. “Each of my photographs is a memory,” he says, remembering how, growing up in rural Canada, his Read More

Sudnya Shroff and the Silent Language of Pure Feeling

India has recently emerged as a major player on the world`s art map, with modern Indian masters such as F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain commanding prime prices on the international auction circuit. Something of their vivid colors and high spirits can be seen in the paintings of Sudnya Shroff, a recently naturalized (2006) American citizen Read More

A Powerful Female Spirit Haunts the Art of Susannah Virginia Griffin

One of the Texas artist Susannah Virginia Griffin’s most affecting paintings is the acrylic on canvas entitled “All that Glitters.” In a vigorous flurry of gestural strokes, it depicts a faceless doll with long yellow hair, its bent, bow legs hardly suggesting those of a ballerina, even as they issue from a tattered cerulean blue Read More

Tamar Rosen: Heir to a Noble Painterly Tradition

There are certain painters whose work appears to be as much about honoring the tradition of painting itself as about the subjects that their paintings depict. Upon such artist we sometimes bestow the honorific of “painter’s painter,” and that designation seems entirely appropriate for Tamar Rosen, an artist from Tel Aviv, widely exhibited in both Read More

Vanida Amiot’s Style Synthesizes Dual Cultures

Born in India, but adopted at the age of three by a French family, Vanida Amiot is very definitely a product of two distinctly different cultures, each of which has left its mark on her paintings. Claiming the formative influences of Realism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Cubism and Pop art, she now works in a style, incorporating Read More

Wayne Wilmoth: Space Creates the Place

Photography has turned the corner in recent decades, taking its rightful place beside painting as a major art form and fetching big prices in galleries and auction houses. Wayne Wilmoth, a Texan presently living and working in Naples, Florida, and a professional photographer for two decades, is in the innovative vanguard of the art for Read More

Wei Xiong’s Agile Aesthetic Spans East and West

The defining aesthetic feature of the work of Chinese painter Wei Xiong, who divides her time between Los Angeles, where she worked for twenty years as a fashion designer before turning to painting full-time, and Chengdu, China, where she was born, is how seamlessly she has merged both her adopted and original cultural identities in Read More

Yasuyuki Ito: The Miraculous Inner Vision of a Sight-Impaired Painter

In 2003, Japanese artist Yasuyuki Ito experienced what he describes as a “serious deterioration of my eyesight” due to a loss of central vision. “Since then the process of creation has been more challenging,” he says, “but I continue to depict my interior world and my perception of the outer world, using a variety of Read More

The Tactile/Coloristic Symphonics of Yuta Strega

Although she received her early art education at the College of Fine arts in Frankfurt, Germany, Yuta Strega lives in France and works in a studio that, in the poetic description of one writer “opens onto a long downward sloping garden where vegetal shapes and colors mingle, then stretches into an infinite rolling landscape.” And Read More

Z. Todorova’s Language of Universal Symbols

It is no trick to make a simple thing complex,” the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus once stated. “The real accomplishment is making something complex simple.” He could have been talking about the mixed media works of the artist known as Z. Todorova, who endeavors “to illustrate the important relationship between the natural Read More

Chinese Beauty Inspires Artist Zhang Xiuzhu

The renowned Chinese painter Zhang Xiuzhu is an artist totally enamored of the Asian feminine mystique in the series that he calls “As Time Goes By –– Theatrical Life.” In the West, the phrase “As Time Goes By” immediately evokes the haunting lyrics and melody that accompanied the doomed romance of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Read More

Aelita Andre: A Young Artist Begins

There are situations which not only can but should give any self-respecting critic pause. One of them is a phenomenon such as Aelita Andre, a four-year-old girl of Russian heritage who lives with her parents in Melbourne, Australia, and is presently being celebrated in major media –– including by Germaine Greer in The Guardian and Read More

Anna Rita Alatan (ARA): The Poetry of Color

At once dynamic and serene, the paintings of Anna Rita Alatan elegantly transform imagined worlds into visual reality. ARA, as Alatan is also known, discovered painting while studying fashion at Accademia di costume e di Moda in Rome. She switched her focus from fashion to painting, encouraged by this new, expressive outlet for her dreamy Read More

A Global Photographic Survey Comes to Chelsea

Written by: Maureen Flynn International trends in contemporary art photography are featured in “Tripping the Light Fantastic,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from November 20 through December 11. (Reception Thursday, November 29, 6 to 8 PM.) Mexico’s Alfredo Esparza makes an impressive debut in his first exhibition outside that country (where he had Read More

Charting the Impossible: The Intrepid Mission of Slobodan Miljevic

Written by: Martin Freund Such is the influence of postmodern inclusiveness that some of the most interesting abstract painters today employ a much broader vocabulary of forms and manners within an individual work than their predecessors in previous decades, when sharper distinctions were insisted upon between hardedge abstraction, lyrical abstraction, and other subdivisions of nonobjective Read More

Concha Osuna Masters Watercolor in Street Scenes of Light and Spirit

Sometimes the greatest magic can be realized by combining the most elemental ingredients. That’s certainly the case with the watercolor paintings of Concha Osuna, a masterful artist with the wondrous ability to breathe light and vitality into street scenes. Capturing everything from figures of elderly villagers to modern urban youths, Osuna’s scenes feel immediate, as Read More

Francine Gravel’s Glimpse Into Another World

Francine Gravel’s immensely evocative body of work offers a glimpse into another world. Gravel creates paintings with a mixture of ink, acrylic base and oil on linen, with some pieces over six feet in length. Each work is a new scene in the particular world that she has created, where romanticism, symbolism, magical realism and Read More

Exploring the Ongoing Evolution of Digital Art

Written by: Peter Wiley Practically everyone fools around with computers these days, but only the highly talented sidestep facile special effects to create genuine works of art, such as those featured in “Pixel Perfect: ¬¬The Digital Fine Art Exhibition,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from April 18 through May 8 (Reception: April 24, Read More

Fragments of the Real: The Mixed Media Collages of Stephanie Lawrence

Stephanie Lawrence’s captivating mixed media collages are influenced by graffiti and city walls from around the globe. Lawrence, who travels frequently, is interested in the layering of billboards, fliers, graffiti, and other features of the aging environment. Travelers to ancient cities talk of charm, antique collectors gush over patina—Lawrence alchemizes these elements with a keen Read More

Danish Painter Per Hillo Delineates Our Interconnectedness

Few contemporary paintings evoke the underlying energies of all things as dynamically as those of Per Hillo, an artist from Denmark, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street,from January 6 to 27, 2009. (Reception Thursday, January 8, 6 to 8 pm.) For although his paintings contain images, the overriding element in Hillo’s compositions Read More

Contemporary Art Informed by the Legacy of Greece and Italy

Written by: Maurice Taplinger It is a daunting task to review an exhibition as sweeping in scope as “The Odyssey Within: An Exhibition of Fine Art From Italy and Greece,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from December 14, 2007 through January 3, 2008, with a reception on Thursday, December 20, from 6 to Read More

Exploring the Unknown: The Paintings of Zohar Wallach

Searching for harmony in innocuous places, Zohar Wallach allows herself to be guided by patterns that appear beneath the surface of her works. She describes herself as being “fascinated by organic mechanisms and natural elements.” This interest pushes Wallach to look for inspiration in the areas of her paintings that would generally be appreciated only Read More

Evoking Spirit: The Intuitive Transformations of Allan Wash

Written by: Peter Wiley Certain timeless motifs that occur again and again in native cultures worldwide inform the art of Allan Wash, whose compelling acrylic paintings can be seen at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from October 26 through November 15. (Reception Thursday, November 1, from 6 to 8 PM.) As a boy, during Read More

Egalitarian Gallantry Ennobles the Art of Ricardo Lowenberg

Written by: Marie R. Pagano Women are objectified, and even demeaned, by male artists in so many ways in so much contemporary art that one is hardly prepared for the mellow romanticism and aesthetic gallantry that distinguishes the paintings of the Mexican artist Ricardo Lowenberg, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, in Read More

“Altered States” of Contemporary Photography in Chelsea

Unfathomable as it may seem, not all that long ago (which is to say as recently as the 1950s), color was taboo if one wished to be taken seriously as a fine artist in the still relatively new field of fine art photography. Purists associated color with advertising layouts in glossy magazines, and dismissed it Read More

Anna Ravliuc Lends Redeeming Beauty to Harsh Truths

Inspired by pagan traditions and prehistoric legends, Anna Ravliuc, an artist born in the Ukraine, now living in Romania, emerges as a contemporary heir to Gustave Moreau in the paintings viewed at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from February 24 through March 17. (Reception: Thursday, March 5, 6 to 8pm.) For like that great Read More

Aranka Israni’s Ever-Evolving Quest for Homeostasis

Written by: Maurice Taplinger An Indian raised as a Muslim in Dubai, Aranka Israni brings a strong sense of her cultural heritage to bear in her paintings on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from September 9 through 30 (Reception: Thursday, September 11, 6 to 8pm). Yet, in order to gain enough distance Read More

Denudation and Redemption in the Digital Art of Keith Kovach

Written by: Marie R. Pagano The distinguished art historian Kenneth Clark once made a fine distinction between the nude and the naked. “The word nude.'” Clark pointed out, “carries, in educated usage no uncomfortable undertone.” However, “to be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most Read More

A Diverse Survey of New Japanese Painting

We’ve been yearning for an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art that is not exclusively limited to Hello Kitty clones, and here it is: “Matrix of the Mind,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street from February 24 through March 17 (with a reception on Thursday, March 5, from 6 to 8pm), proves that some artists Read More

An Informative Survey of New Canadian Painting Comes to Chelsea

Written by: Maurice Taplinger We live in such relatively close proximity to our “neighbor to the north,” as it is often called; yet far too many of us remain unaware of the vital contemporary art scene that it harbors. For this reason, and simply for the overall excellence of the work on view, “Beyond Borders: Read More

Fumio Noma: Listening to the Whisperings of Nature

Written by: Byron Coleman Looking at the work of Fumio Noma, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from September 9 through 30 (reception September 11, 6 to 8 pm), one is reminded of the great Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, who fell under the influence of Western writers such as Baudelaire, Poe, and Read More

Carol Reeves: Still Life as Safe Haven

Written by: Lisa Rosenfeld Matisse once said that he wanted his paintings to be “like a comfortable armchair for the viewer” and this seems a statement with which Carol Reeves might readily agree, judging from the amiable appeal of the paintings she is showing at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from November 20th through Read More

Cary Gang’s Sumptuous Synthesis of Color and Gesture

Above all else, the New York painter Cary Gang is a colorist. Before she became a painter, she was a singer, and the sheer musicality of her work reminds one that the term “chromatic” refers to music scales as well as to the various qualities of color that have compelled the doubly gifted artist from Read More

Discovering the Emotional Expressionism of Efrain Cruz

Written by: Maurice Taplinger Born in Veracruz Mexico, now living and working in Valdosta, Georgia, Efrain Cruz is a “natural,” judging from the work on view in “The Allegory of Form,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street from February 5 through 26. (Reception: Thursday, February 7, from 6 to 8PM.) For Cruz’s work, most Read More

Eric Robin: Conjuring the Face of Suffering and Compassion

As a police officer for the city of Brussels, the Belgian painter Eric Robin came to see himself as a “witness of humanity,” and that, he says, has been one of his abiding inspirations. Certainly a sense of humanity in the raw is everywhere evident in the paintings Robin will be exhibiting at Agora Gallery, Read More

Daniel Sewell at Agora: Reconfiguring Cubism

Figurative, cubist, improvised, process-oriented” is how Daniel Sewell, an American artist presently living in Shanghai, China, sums up his compositions in spray paint. However, an underlying conceptual complexity and allusive resonance that defies such succinct description comes across in the works by Sewell on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from September 8 Read More

Avant New-York, Yuta Strega expose son << Concerto >> � Villefranche

Published in Le Villefranchois Read an English translation of the article

Avant New-York, Yuta Strega expose son << Concerto >> à Villefranche

Published in Le Villefranchois Before New York, Yuta Strega shows her “Concerto” in Villefranche Fine Arts. Yuta Strega is having an exhibition in Villefranche. A rare event, not to be missed. She paints, she teaches, she travels, she creates a garden, a landscape, just like in life. Yuta Strega is all this, and yet much Read More

New Directions in Photography Seen in Chelsea

Written by: Marie R. Pagano That no other art form has progressed as rapidly as photography in the past half century should come as no surprise to viewers of “Tripping the Light Fantastic¬ The Fine Art Photography Exhibition,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from April 18 through May 8. (Reception: Thursday, April 24, Read More

Steven Mark Glatt and the Majesty of Melancholy

My work comes from a place that few people get to visit,” says Steven Mark Glatt, whose paintings will be on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from January 8 through 29, 2010, with a reception on Thursday, January 14, from 6 to 8 PM. “This place is blessed and cursed.” Because he Read More

Sandra Valentim – New York Gallery Displays Creative Brazilian Art

Written by: Angela Schreiber(Comunidade News 09/10/08) The Masters of the Imagination Exposition: The Latin American Fine Art Exhibition includes four Brazilians. The colored and creativity of latin art will be able to be seen from September 9 to 30th at Agora Gallery, in New York, with the exposition Masters of the Imagination: The Latin American Read More

Photography: Angles of Vision, Versions of Reality

The confluence of personal vision and state of the art technology amounts to a powerful creative synthesis in “Altered States of Reality: an Exhibition of Analog and Digital Fine Art Photography,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from October 27 through November 17. (Reception: Thursday October 29, 6 to 8 PM.) Typographically, Maria Trezzi Read More

Ein Münsteraner in New York

Published on Münsterländische Volkszeitung Without any doubt a man in great demand: Dr. Peter Rademacher. Dr. Peter Rademacher. The ophthalmologist and artist from Münster presents his artworks in March 2010 in New York. He will be appearing in Agora Gallery’s “Contemporary German Art“- The New York Experience” exhibition, for which he was chosen because of Read More

New Art from Australia and New Zealand in Chelsea

Written by: Peter Wiley Australian art critic and inveterate curmudgeon Robert Hughes once stated somewhat patronizingly that Australian art and by implication, that of New Zealand as well was “purely a product of isolation.” But that opinion no longer appears to hold true, given the level of high purpose and sophistication on view in “Out Read More

Tradition and Originality in the Art of George J.D. Bruce

Written by: Wilson Wong What makes an artist original, if not striving after new forms of expression? Those who truly know would argue that it is actually the artist’s ability to imbue even the most traditional subjects and genres with the stamp of an individual sensibility. The paintings of George J.D. Bruce are a fine Read More

Michael Gemmell: A Painter of the Bogs and the Irish Earth

Written by: Peter Wiley Encountering the work of the Irish artist Michael Gemmell, one is reminded of a poem by his famous fellow countryman Seamus Heaney called “Exposure” that begins, “It is December in Wicklow: / Alders dripping, birches / Inheriting the last light, / the ash tree cold to look at.” For Gemmell lives Read More

Pat Kagan: A Power that Defies Stereotypes

Like Marlene Dumas, Pat Kagan once felt considerable guilt about having grown up as a white South African during the apartheid era. However, unlike her well known fellow countrywoman, the experience did not have a perverse effect on her art. Although she immigrated to the United States and settled with her family in Maryland in Read More

Gerard Stricher’s Striking Abstract Synthesis

Written by: Peter Wiley In the mid twentieth century, French painting and American painting seemed to represent opposite aesthetic poles. Smarting from European dominance of art for many centuries, the Abstract Expressionists sought to steamroll French finesse with their brash new style. In the postmodern precincts of the present century, however, it is now possible Read More

Nina Ozbey: Postmodern Abstraction Informed By a Sense of the Past

Written by: Wilson Wong Aside from such notable exceptions as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan, few woman artists were admitted into the boy’s club that was the New York School nucleus of the Abstract Expressionist movement at its inception in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not that worthy woman artists were not plentiful; it’s Read More

Giannis Stratis broadens his love of art by living it as well!

At Agora Gallery, December 14 – Jan 3, 2008 Opening Reception December 20, 6-8 PM O Giannis Stratis στο ARTisSpectrum Magazine της Νέας Υόρκη s “Ο Giannis Stratis διευρύνει την αγάπη του για την Τέχνη με το να την ζει εξίσου καλά”. ArtisSpectrum Magazine Vol.17 Ο Πειραιώτης καλλιτέχνης Γιάννης Στρατής μετά από το προηγούμενο δημοσιευμένο Read More

Transcending Boundaries is Second Nature for the Painter NAT

The term “abstract realism,” coined by another writer for this publication some time ago, could sound oxymoronic until one encounters the work of an artist to whom it aptly applies. One of the most accomplished among them to appear on these shores in recent months is the French artist known curiously by the capitalized mononym Read More

Materiality and Meaning in the Art of Monica Marioni

Written by: Patrick Louis Mayhew Jr. Born in Italy in 1972, Monica Marioni seems to synthesize some of the most dynamic developments in modern Italian art to forge her own unique postmodern style in an exhibition on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from December 14, 2007 to January 3, 2008. (Reception Thursday, Read More

Life-Affirming Symbolism in the Art of Patrice Goubeau

Written by: Marie R. Pagano A fantastic vision is heightened by the liberal use of chiaroscuro to lend atmospheric drama to the acrylic paintings of Patrice Goubeau, a winner of the coveted Grand Prize award from the Salon des Artistes Francais, at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , from February 5 through 26. (Reception: Read More

Neil Masterman: A Maestro of Many Styles from the UK

Any exhibition by the British autodidact Neil Masterman could almost be described as a one-man group show, given the broad range of styles and effects this virtuoso artist commands, several of which can be seen at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 26 through July 17. (Reception: Thursday, June 26, from 6 to Read More

Inna Moshkovich: Nature in the Abstract

Written by: Maurice Taplinger It is highly probable that, having been born in Odessa, Ukraine, and having settled in Sydney, Australia, Inna Moshkovich never heard of Jon Schueler. Nonetheless, her paintings show a kinship with that older artist, who would certainly have been known as one of the most gifted of the Abstract Expressionists, had Read More

Markus Maria Saufhaus: A Gentler Approach to Expressionism

Written by: Wilson Wong If every artist can be said to have had a formative experience which spurred the creative urge, for the German painter Markus Maria Saufhaus, it was seeing a photograph as a child of “The Tower of the Blue Horses,” a painting by Franz Marc, a leading member of the Blaue Reiter Read More

The Paintings of Javier Iturbe Unite Two Diverse Traditions

Written by: Maurice Taplinger One of the most interesting things about the Spanish artist Javier Iturbe, whose oils on canvas and panel can be seen in “Persistence of Form,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from March 25 through April 15 (Reception March 27, 6 to 8 PM), is the synthesis he has created Read More

Science and Art Intermarry in the Paintings of Marika Berlind

Although those of limited vision may think of science as a cut and dry subject, every true scientist is involved in a search for the unknown. Thus the Greek-born San Francisco-based painter Marika Berlind, who combines her dual loves¬¬ Astronomy / Mathematics and Art¬¬ in her work, can confidently state, “I do not aspire for Read More

Maria Pia Taverna’s Evocative Realm of Shadows

While many take sides today regarding traditional versus newer media, vehemently espousing the superior aesthetic merits or contemporary relevance of one or the other, some of the most interesting artists are those who evolve a personal synthesis of both. One of the most intriguing discoveries in this regard is Maria Pia Taverna, a native of Read More

Jacqueline Rosenberg’s Aesthetic Mutations of Beauty and Power

Written by: Marie R. Pagano The Dutch artist Jacqueline Rosenberg deals with issues of femininity from what might be termed a post-feminist perspective, in the photographic mixed media prints on canvas that she is showing at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street , from November 20 through December 11. (Reception Thursday, November 29, from 6 Read More

Luigi Galligani : Humanizing Myths, Restoring Our Sense of Wonder

Working primarily in bronze and terra cotta, the Italian sculptor Luigi Galligani reinterprets ancient Mediterranean myths in striking contemporary terms, at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from December 12 through January 2, 2009. (Reception: Thursday, December 18, from 6 – 8pm.) Galligani, who has an impressive exhibition history, has works in important private and Read More

James Kandt’s “Abstract Realism”: Best of Two Worlds

Written by: Maurice Taplinger In contrast to many artists today, who begin showing their work right out of art school, James Kandt has been painting for many years, but has only recently begun exhibiting. While working as an art director for a company in Hollywood that was a pioneer in the development of computer animation, Read More

Guatemala´s Karla Higueros art exhibition at the Agora Gallery in New York

Written by: Barbara Schieber Guatemalan born artist Karla Higueros believes that through her artwork she expresses her deepest feelings, energy, emotions and spirituality. This translates in moods and actions that interact with the canvas at the moment of producing a painting; therefore achieving its own life, which in turn she can sense when she utilizes Read More

Katrin Alvarez: Confronting and Banishing the Demons Within

Written by: Maureen Flynn Like Marlene Dumas, an older artist with whom she shares certain qualities in common, the German painter Katrin Alvarez depicts aspects of human and societal relationships through figures that often take on a doll-like quality, in her exhibition at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from June 3 through 24. (Reception: Read More

Lee Porter: Australia’s Female Answer to “The Male Gaze”

Written by: Maureen Flynn Not counting the well-documented predilections of the ancient Greeks, images of the male derriere are almost as rare in art history as their female counterparts are abundant. The Australian painter Lee Porter makes no extravagant claims for her subject matter, other than to state that she wishes to depict “Aussies from Read More

Katrina Read Extends Australia’s Legacy of Nature Painting

Written by: Maurice Taplinger Given the richness of the country’s natural resources, it should surprise no one that there is a strong tradition of landscape painting in Australia. It dates all the way back to the colonial period work of Thomas Wantling and Conrad Martens, continued in the modernist nature paintings of Lloyd Rees and Read More

On display at Agora Gallery, December 7 – 27, 2007

Opening Reception December 7 th, 6-8 PM Almeriane: A Painter of the Andalusian Art- Nouveau Almeriane, a Nueva York. [caption id="attachment_94898" align="alignleft" width="782"] Click the image to view article[/caption] Alegorías. La pintora de Catell del Rey expondrá en la gran manzana tras ganar “Toile d’Or 2006” en Paris. Desde su participación en la Bienla de Read More

Almeriane: A Painter of the Andalusian Art-Nouveau

Exhibiting in Chelsea February 20th through March 13th 2007 Opening Reception February 22nd. 6-8 PM

Lyrical Vivacity in the Paintings of Alyssa Traub

Although twenty-one year old Alyssa Traub has a BFA degree in Fine Art Photography, she is also a sculptor and painter. To be exhibited at Agora Gallery 530 West 25th Street, from January 8 through 29, 2010, with a reception on January 14, from 6 to 8 PM, Traub’s paintings are refreshingly free of the Read More

Universal Connections in the Art of Anicée

Written by: Peter Wiley Aesthetic relationships can often cross cultural barriers and manifest in unexpected ways. One such example can be seen in the possibly unintended yet striking Asian feeling in the compositions of the gifted young contemporary painter who exhibits under the single name of Anicée. Born in the French Alps of a French Read More

Anne Elisabeth Hogh in The Color of Motion

From January 2nd to the 23rd The reception takes place on January 4th, 6 – 8 PM

Anya Rubin’s Paintings Explore Issues of Human Interconnectedness

Written by: Wilson Wong   A singular synthesis of humanistic and formal factors enlivens the art of Anya Rubin, a Russian-born painter presently living and working in New Jersey, at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from September 28 through October 18. (Reception Thursday, October 4, 6 to 8 PM.) One of the paintings that Read More

Contemporary Directions in Latin American Art

If the art of Latin America has one overriding characteristic it is an imaginative scope that comes across in the aptly named group show “Masters of the Imagination: The Latin American Fine Art Exhibition,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from September 8 through 29. (Reception: Thursday, September 10, from 6 to 8 PM.) Read More

The Paintings of Martina O’Brien Reconfigure the Irish Landscape from Scratch

Written by: Wilson Wong We often tend to stereotype the culture of a country when a particular field of eminence happens to upstage all others. Ireland is a prime example: While Irish art is hardly as well known as Irish literature ––and particularly Irish poetry ––that verdant land has produced its own fair share of Read More

Krzis-Lorent FrédériqueK and the Lives of Women

If unabashed beauty is the last taboo in fine art, fortunately the French painter Krzis-Lorent FrédériqueK chooses to ignore it. For FrédériqueK’s oils on canvas celebrate the female form, as well as the occasional landscape subject, in a manner that, while thoroughly contemporary, harks back to periods before the cult of ugliness came to rule Read More

Steve Karol in Pixel Perfect: The Digital Fine Art Exhibition

At Agora Gallery, January 26 – February 15, 2007 Opening Reception February 1, 2007

Jolanta Paterek’s Material Odes to Purification and Redemption

Chelsea, 530 West 25th Street , from June 28 through July 1. Reception June 29, from 6 to 8 PM. The title of Jolanta Paterek’s series, “A Woman a Man or a Human” is intriguingly enigmatic, suggesting a singular view of our species, an existential ambiguity regarding spiritual and sexual identity. Reportedly, each of her Read More

Quintessence: The Mysterious Women of Dianne Bernstein

Though the tradition of painting is strong and storied in her family, Dianne Bernstein did not take it up herself until an open-air class in Fiesole exposed her to the medium. It was there, in the Tuscan countryside, that Bernstein’s passion for the arts was stoked and brought to a steady blaze. Earlier studies in Read More

The Complex and Brilliantly Colored Paintings of George Tsatsos

The complex and brilliantly colored paintings of George Tsatsos are currently being featured for the second time at Agora Gallery from October 10th to October 30th, 2014. A former captain of industry who’s still closely involved in business, Tsatsos started off his artistic career as a collector of contemporary art and painted for personal pleasure. Read More

Ghass Rouzkhosh: Painting Without Borders

“Painting crosses all boundaries,” artist Ghass Rouzkhosh says, and his bold, emotionally gripping works offer proof of that statement. His experiences as both an exile and a soldier in the Iran-Iraq War are the source from which his message emerges, as he brings the force of those events vividly to life in his paintings. “With Read More

Helga Zumstein: The Art of Intimacy

Looking between the bodies and interactions in Helga Zumstein’s work, any viewer can rejoice in her coded messages. Her wholly recognizable scenes show with graphic aptitude that art is everywhere, but sometimes it takes an artist to truly capture it. Zumstein, a Swiss national, has made painting her mission and her passion, and she incorporates Read More

Uncovering a New Sense of Place: The Landscape Paintings of Krim Benterrak

When confronted with a Krim Benterrak landscape painting, the viewer is immediately struck by the immense sense of space, of unending vistas marked by brilliant saturated colors, smooth bodies of water, and unfettered lines. Each painting is distinguished by a pervading sense of harmony and balance, unencumbered by time or geographical place. By their very Read More

Mituyasu Yokota: Renovating and Re-Imagining the Beauty of Japanese Culture

To Mituyasu Yokota, the time-honored kimono and obi, the sash worn around the kimono, are integral parts of the beauty and history of Japanese culture. The combination of delicate lines with a subtly varied color palette that is exhibited in those items of traditional clothing results in a unique physical presence, one the artist both Read More

Nico Solis: Building on the Energy of the Streets

Nico Solis is not only accomplished in his extraordinary, energetic paintings, but he is also an accomplished music producer who has worked with such artists as Kanye West and Ciara. In this, he brings a distinctive feeling for rhythm and counterpoint to each image he creates. “From the time I could first write anything down,” Read More

Nicole Tremblay: Elegant Odalisques

Coming to Agora Gallery this summer is the solo exhibition of Canadian artist Nicole Tremblay. In Tremblay’s paintings, her female subjects take on a presence that is larger than life. “I have always been fascinated by the presentation of women,” the artist says, “and the inspiration that they represent in art, as far back as Read More

Paul Calabrese: Drawing New York

Looking back on his childhood, Paul Calabrese says, “Growing up poor in Brooklyn was tough… but as hard as things seemed back then I wouldn’t change it. We played stickball, handball, wrote graffiti, and caused a lot of mischief. The world was ours and we had no rules.” Born in Yonkers, New York, Calabrese moved Read More

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