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***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ******
The Hand Connected to the I - An exhibition of paintings, sculpture and works
on paper by twelve trained and untrained artists from Europe and the United
States at the Katonah Village Library Galleries, 26 Bedford Road, Katonah,
New York.
This unique exhibition opens December 2, 2000, and will feature works by
French artists Gérard Sendrey and Ody Saban, Dutch artists Paulus De Groot,
Jaco Kranendonk and Hans Verschoor, and American artists Ross Brodar, Raimundo
Figueroa, Herm Freeman, Anne Grgich, Charles Lassiter, Donald Pierce and
Phil Demise Smith.
By design, The Hand Connected to the I includes both mainstream artists and
those considered to be Outsider, Art Brut, Neuve Invention or self-taught.
Each of these artists has developed their own 'signature' or style that
reflects an inner vision. From formal guidance to no training at all, the
real connection between these artists is their "I-ness" - that is,
their
individual expression emerging from within and in response to the world in
which we live.
Gérard Sendrey, a central figure of the contemporary Art Brut or Neuve
Invention movement, resides and works in Bégles, France, and is director of
Le Site de la Création Franche. Sendrey has developed his own personal
hieroglyphic, moving gracefully through many styles, forms and shapes.
Drawing on all the faces of life, he usually works small, creating faces that
erupt directly from the moment and mature into expressive characters. He is
constantly experimenting, inventing and discovering his mediums of ink and
acrylic. His 'pictographic' quality is masterfully rendered in both black and
white and color. Most of France's Art Brut, Neuve Invention or Artist
Singulier artists connect with Gérard's warm and generous vision.
Ody Saban is a complex, multi-dimensional artist from Paris. Her ink drawings
of 'figures begetting figures' have been celebrated throughout Europe and the
U.S. Saban was featured in Raw Vision Magazine (#27) and has just completed a
retrospective at the Musée de la Creátion Franche. Poetry and performance are
intertwined in Saban's life and the erotic entanglements of her art are both
spontaneous and controlled.
Paulus De Groot and Jaco Kranendonk are both artists from the Atelier
Herenplaats in Rotterdam, Holland. The Herenplaats is an extraordinary studio
working exclusively with mentally handicapped artists who come to the
Herenplaats with unique talents. The studio provides technical instruction to
enable these artists to exhibit their work. Kranendonk draws and paints
cityscapes of Rotterdam, focusing on the transportation systems. His black,
web-like renderings and personal perspectives are joined with his own sense
of color and contrast. De Groot paints brightly colored figures and shapes
bubbling with primacy. These forms appear to be innocent self-explorations
but are actually imbued with powerful undercurrents.
Hans Verschoor is a self-taught multiplicity -- a poet, painter, ceramist,
furniture maker and chef. His home, in the middle of a small forest in
Holland, is a work of art inside and out. Hans' work is often primitive and
yet very sophisticated. His figures are full of fantasy and magic and seem to
defy gravity. They float and soar into themselves, human and not human in the
same breath.
The works of Ody Saban, Gérard Sendrey, Jaco Kranendonk, Paulus De Groot and
Hans Verschoor have been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and Europe, and
are included in the Collection Art Brut (Neuve Invention) in Lausanne,
Switzerland, the Museum de Stadshof, Holland, Musée de la Création Franche,
France, and the American Visionary Art Museum, in the U.S.
In his most recent series, MIA Collages, Raimundo Figueroa incorporates
collage elements of tribal masks, caricatures, sheet music, postage stamps,
photographs, fauna and abstractions. Working in his native Puerto Rico,
the
artist juxtaposes these materials with fragments of his personal life -
notes, sketches, studies and hand-written quotes -- into a personal visual
record or history. His works are in various corporate and museum collections,
including the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Museo Tamayo, Museum
of Modern Art in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Paine Webber, Bacardi Corporation,
Equitable Corporation, Xerox Corporation, Prudential Securities and Shearson
American Express in Chicago. Figueroa appears courtesy of Ken Nahan, Jr. Fine
Art in Ridgefield, CT.
Anne Grgich is one of the most original and innovative artists in the group
of American artists known as Outsiders. Completely self-taught and the cover
story of Raw Vision Magazine (#22), she became known for her one-of-a-kind
books filled with page after page of impassioned, expressionistic faces and
figures. Grgich often employs collage and vigorously applies layer after
layer of overpainting, covering found texts and images, yet allowing some of
the underneath to remain visible. This layering suggests generations of
mystery and mystique to her exotic characters.
Herm Freeman is a trained artist whose obsession with landscape melds his
remembrance of the French countryside (Provence) with his affinity for rural
Connecticut. In his 'memory of a remembrance', Freeman dreams up lush,
partially abstracted and colorful landscapes from memory and then
superimposes his own inner landscape. In 2000, Freeman was awarded Best of
Show at Silvermine's 51st annual Art of the Northeast exhibition.
Charles Keeling Lassiter spans both worlds - he is a trained artist who is
also considered an outsider. He has participated in numerous exhibitions
including the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and the Musée de L'Art Brut in
1986. He work has often been compared to Jean Dubuffet because of his raw and
primitive renderings. Works in this show are all from the 1950's and have
rarely been seen. Provocative and spontaneous eruptions that seem to rise up
out of the dark, the portraits are not of this world but are precise visions
of some inner sense of his being. Lassiter's works can be found in such
collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Donald Pierce, who died last year at the age of 84, was actively painting,
exhibiting and teaching right up to his death. A trained artist who worked in
many different mediums and styles, all of his works - watercolors, paintings
and assemblages - are expressionistic in nature, spanning abstraction and
primitive figuration. Throughout his career as an artist, Pierce recognized
that juxtaposing familiar things in unfamiliar ways is his method of
assemblage and the essence of humor. The works in this show were created in
the 1960's while taking a break from his "real" art. Pierce displays a
singular gift for transforming discarded objects into wry, totemic artifacts
of modern life. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in distinguished
public collections such as the Butler Institute of American Art and the San
Diego Museum of Fine Arts.
Ross Brodar is the youngest artist in this show but the wisdom and insights
of his intense and often-terrified figures belie his age. He began to paint
as a way to express his complex youth, complicated by having to 'gasp for
breath' due to asthma. He has turned his own personal 'dark spots' into an
enlightened and meaningful expression. He has ventured into all mediums (with
a recent passion for filmmaking and music) using whatever material is
available to piece together a spontaneous, raw truth about his daily life.
Ross first exhibited his work on the streets of New York City. His work is
now part of major outsider art collections and he was recently included in
"Error and Eros", an exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum
curated
by John Maizels.
Phil Demise Smith is the curator and point of reference for all the artists
in this show. As director of A Gallery @ Wares for Art in New York City for
the past seven years, he has been exhibiting the work of European and
American self-taught/outsider artists alongside the expressionistic work of
trained artists and craftsmen. He is a poet, musician and self-taught artist.
All his work is part of his "uni-verse", his one poem, and stands as
an
emotional diary. His art is intuitive and spontaneous, a "rehearsed
spontaneity" that illustrates the moment in which the work was created and
includes all of time up to that point. His primary sense of color and
figuration looks very CoBrAesque and child-like but emanates from his own,
personal inner vision which pays homage to the idea that "circumstance has
a
mind of its own." He has been published, collected and exhibited in the
U.S.
and Europe.
The exhibition runs December 2, 2000 - December 23, 2000, at the Katonah
Village Library Galleries, 26 Bedford Road, Katonah, New York (1 hour from
Grand Central Station on Metro North to Katonah - Library is one block from
the Katonah station), tel. (914) 232-3508. The opening reception is Saturday,
December 2, from 2 to 4 p.m. Hours are Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5
p.m.
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