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Congruent Allusions For audiences who enjoy a visual exploration of inventive styles, viewpoints, and techniques, Agora Galley presents Congruent Allusions, an exciting look into the world of contemporary art. Each artist in this talented group possesses an inimitable worldview and they have developed a unique style of abstraction as a means to transmit their extraordinary visions.
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Laura Bauer
 
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Hard-edged swirls and painterly mosaics of overlapping squares and rectangles inhabit the art of Laura Bauer.
Born in San Francisco and raised in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, Bauer discovered the value of independence and learned to identify the often-overlooked beauty in daily life. “This is the true essence of creativity,” she states, “seeing the potential for art in everyday places.” It was her sister that helped Bauer realize the power of painting seven years ago, as a means to rediscover herself during a turbulent period in her life. Bauer immersed herself in acrylic painting, and found that it had the potential to captivate and soothe the soul. The ensuing paintings are a dance of color and pattern, where the array of layers come forth and recede in rhythmic pulses. Her works have been exhibited around California and Washington State and she has recently acquired representation in New York. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.
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"P056"
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" P054"
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Lila Fernan
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Lila Fernan's vivid abstract expressionism reveals a deep concern with both somber weightiness and an irrepressible urge toward flight. Her paintings repeatedly explore the fluidity of boundaries, and the degrees of coherence between form and background. Coal-gray tones are balanced by flame-like detailing, with a tension created between the fullness of the dark colors with the striving of the lighter colors. Her repeated exploration of a central spiral shape placed against an opposing color reveals the pathos in her works, the obsession at the heart of being human.
Lila values the repeated exploration of the same emotional and psychological territory, the same narrative which is implied in her works. She makes use of the possibilities in her art form to explore themes of personal vulnerability, intuition and the challenges of craft. Both a source of frenetic energy as well as personal centeredness, Lila Fernan's work frequently reveals a mind deeply in touch with the human state of ambivalence.
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"Momentum II"
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"Momentum III"
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Thomia Jones
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The paintings of Thomia Jones are gentle without being bland, colorful without being gaudy. One may first notice the canvas size and depth of her acrylic hues, but then it’s the subject matter and perspective that captivate. Depicting seascapes vividly, Ms. Jones reflects them from the mind instead of the eye, displaying nature’s beauty through a lens in her heart. Thomia Jones considers her style to be semi-abstract, with definite line, form, balance and focal points. Surprisingly, the words “exciting” and “relaxing” can both be applied to a single one of her paintings!
New Jersey-born Ms. Jones was inspired by the art of her portrait-painter father. After years of professional art education, she received a Masters degree and taught art in the Philadelphia School District while raising her family. Thomia Jones’s work has been shown in galleries, art centers and private exhibitions in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. She explains her passion simply: “My life is art; art is my life.”
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"Midday"
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"Equal Balance"
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Andrea Noël Kroenig
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Using a combination of pastels, acrylic, and spray paint, Andrea Noël Kroenig creates her distinctive abstract paintings with soft, silky gradations of tone. Her unusual selections of color create a fundamental mood to each work, either energizing or subduing the composition as a whole. Kroenig includes recurring elements that give her oeuvre a distinctive continuity. Eye-shaped forms and plant-like motifs rise out of the inky areas of shadow while lighter colored spirals and other organic shapes overlap. Her creative methods are completely intuitive, "My abstracts are unique in that each painting is a visual experiment with no pre-determined composition," Kroenig explains.
An artist who truly understands her artistic media, Kroenig holds a BS and an MS in Chemistry from Albright College and Texas A & M University, respectively. She currently works in the cosmetics industry having devised formulas for lipsticks, makeup, and body paints. Kroenig lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
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"Kiteflying on Martian Plains"
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"Toreador Surrender Flag"
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Marty Maehr
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Like hypnotic stained glass windows, Marty Maehr’s beautiful abstract paintings seem etched with light and energy. Configurations of colorful shapes, usually outlined in black, are puzzled together to form sprawling landscapes including plants, animals and architecture. With a keen sense for composition, Maehr’s creative process produces a wonderful feeling of movement as the line work flows together and shimmering, multicolored shapes converge in an orchestra of brilliant hues. In both content and style, Maehr’s art is instantly accessible to people from all walks of life. “My only goal as an artist is to develop naturally and in a genuine way,” he explains. “If nothing else, I'd like my artwork to be honest and sincere.”
Drawing inspiration from such titans of literature as Plato, Nietzche and Emerson, Maehr’s artwork celebrates the exquisite moments of life and its ever-present connection to nature. Maehr’s career in the arts continues to develop as he has recently acquired gallery representation in New York. Maehr lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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"The Conversion on the Way to Damascus After Caravaggio"
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"Two Trees Growing on a Hilltop"
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Carmen Maria
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Carmen Maria’s recent work employs a grand range of visual texture. In some of her paintings, an austere simplicity reminiscent of Japanese prints fastens the eye cleanly to one fixed point, while in others a Klimptean agoraphobia, loaded with textiles and the tropes of textile design and quilt making, invite breathless, frenetic viewing.
In these canvasses, one finds a reverence for the mythological mingling beautifully with an unmistakable streak of mysticism. With her strong classical sense, Maria uses unmasked anachronisms- placing a figure in a modern pair of denim jeans on a classical Albertian grid, for example-or depicting modern lovers on the same canvas with a Trojan soldier-to evoke a sense of unsettledness within the banal and everyday. At the same time, the contrasts work to invoke not displacement but synthesis, suggesting that the classical is connected with the modern and the basic components of human reality constant. Carmen Maria lives and exhibits her work in Mexico City.
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"Under the Beech"
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"Inverted Fruits"
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kenneth martin
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Using his intense creativity, kenneth martin creates boldly textural and exquisitely colored mixed media works on canvas that effectively communicate emotions through visual means. Martin's works not only reflect his own inner psychology, but more importantly, elicit the feelings and thoughts of the viewer, allowing them to contemplate and experience their own deep emotions. This transference of emotion from artist, to canvas, to viewer, brings Martin's large and dramatic paintings to a decidedly more intimate realm, fostering for at least a brief moment, a quiet space of reflective sensitivity in our fast paced world.
Martin's sophisticated paintings initially appear as pure abstractions, but in fact, these works of Reflective Expressionism, are representational images of minute moments of time, the blurred images recorded in the mind's eye. These blurred visions convey a continuous energy, rather than a static moment, which reflects the artist's underlying optimism and forward-moving thought. Kenneth Martin lives, works, and exhibits in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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"Autumn"
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"Legitimacy"
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Chris Spuglio
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Chris Spuglio's daring, multilayered explorations into such raw emotions as rage, loss and despair straddle the line between abstraction and surrealism, while also taking a near-sculptural approach to the canvas itself. He scratches into his paintings, adding mixed-media textures, and portrays objects such as nails and stones against turbulent backgrounds of deep crimson, aquamarine or midnight blue. He makes particular use of strong vertical lines, whether in the form of savage lightning-like jagged streaks, or thorny strokes from the tip of his brush. The theme of death-within-life is strong in Chris' work, as he frequently uses dreams as raw material and chooses subjects which suggest a deep absence.
There is a brooding, severe subtext to Chris' work beyond the complex visuals of his paintings, and it is the skilled creation of deep-toned backgrounds in their support of his ecstatic brushwork which creates this pervasive tension. As Chris Spuglio endures the artist's turbulent emotional territory, he presents us with his impressions of that rough terrain.
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"The Stains of Time"
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"The Reanimation of a Body in Ruin"
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Meng Yang
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Rhythmic and careful, elegant and searching, Meng Yang’s paintings combine blossoming potency with soft-hued delicacy. Yang uses lines as though they were crucial to survival, making them the visual building blocks of her intricate paintings. The lines ubiquitously stand in for control and stability, but also for freedom. Though the repetition of strokes connotes consistency, the finality and immediacy of each line imbues Yang’s paintings with a constantly mounting potential energy. She introduces lyrical shapes, which interrupt the stable directionality of her lines and erupt within her compositions like small gusts of wind.
The serenity of Yang’s judiciously rendered paintings tempers their underlying intensity, evoking the sensation of a lucid dream: though aware of the urgency of the corporal world, the viewer is distanced from reality by a quixotic, cadenced haze of marks. Meng Yang studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tianjin, China, and currently studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Nürnberg, Germany, where she lives and works.
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"Untitled 14"
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"Untitled 4"
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