Collective Exhibition

June 3 - 24, 2008

Reception: Thursday, June 05, 2008, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Gallery Location: 530 West 25th St, Chelsea, New York
Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 11am - 6pm

Helmut Bischof Michel Buret Marco Abbamondi Stacy Cosgrove Gernot Kissel Katrin Alvarez

Delineation of Form

Form is the vessel in which ideation takes shape, and it is with ingenuity and abundant variety that artists communicate their ideas about the world. The Delineation of Form is a captivating journey into the hearts and minds of two talented artists who have distinctive techniques and interests. The artworks complement one another by exploring individual perspectives and the imaginative means to express them.

Helmut Bischof

Artist Page

Painting with wax on paper, Helmut Bischof designs works that are rich in color. In the wake of World War Two, Bischof’s hometown of Wesel, Germany, was the type of dreary that made imagination and a spirit of survival necessities. Oppressed by bleak grays and browns, Bischof yearned for colors in both a physical reality and a metaphorical sense and therefore turned to painting. When most put on masks to hide their suffering, Bischof chose to live life to the fullest and paint brightly and powerfully.

The result is a body of artwork that is vibrant not just for its colors but for its depth of shapes. Long, thick black spirals swoop through the paintings. Staccato lines at varying angles crash into a cacophony of color. Individualized boxes within the framework of a rectangular piece of paper emphasize form yet are couched by a velvety, amorphous background. Wildly conceptual, the images evoke feeling yet allow the viewer to interpret their meanings.

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"Bringing the Light"

"The Discovery of the Eye"

Michel Buret

Artist Page

Colors splash across French artist Michel Buret’s canvases, creating an urban vibe. In-your-face reds, blues, and yellows look gritty when paired with heavy doses of tar black. Like subway billboards, the canvases are large—up to 24" x 32"—and demand attention. Jagged lines zip up, down, and all around, as if refusing to be boxed in. The thrust of colors in bold, asymmetrical shapes creates movement. Buret propels you through the shifting perspectives of his work, hurrying you to get involved in the energy of each painting.

The complexity of the shapes shows there’s labored thought in Buret’s process. More than just throwing paint at the canvas, Buret collages exquisite lines and arcs together. Influenced by “Piet Mondrian for his rigorous mind, Jackson Pollock for his ‘chaos,’ and Max Ernst for his incredible techniques,” Buret creates works full of vigor. In Michel Buret’s works, the paint may have already dried, but the action hasn’t stopped.

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"Scratch"

"Happy Crystal"

Reflective Reality

The artist's interpretation of reality is an intrinsic part of the creation process. Agora Gallery's Reflective Reality takes audiences on an amazing and diverse tour as seen through the eyes of three talented artists. Each intriguing work is a unique expression of the creative individual as they cultivate their disparate viewpoints and varied interests.

Marco Abbamondi

Artist Page

Marco Abbamondi’s paintings are comprised of contrasts; the disparities between light and dark, curves and rectilinear forms, representation and abstraction define his style. Growing up in Naples, Italy, Abbamondi sites the elements of fire and water as two of his main sources of inspiration. The dominating presence of Mount Vesuvius and the calming quality of the surrounding water are present in the themes of several Abbamondi paintings.

These works are unique because they combine Abbamondi’s personal style with the very rich Italian culture. The artist includes not only elements of Italy’s physical landscape but also its most important public figures. Through his simplified shapes, he shows the essentials of his subjects in a way that encourages his viewers to think about the paintings. Another unique quality of these works is their three dimensionality; details in the paintings reach out of the canvases, giving them a characteristic sense of sculpture. Marco Abbamondi currently resides in Naples, Italy. His artworks have been exhibited throughout Europe.

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"Sofia"

"Marcello"

Stacy Cosgrove

Artist Page

Stacy Cosgrove’s paintings have the luminosity of stained-glass windows. It is as if she has captured the sun’s rays within the colors of her rainbow palette. Emerald green and cerulean dominate her landscape, evoking a sense of romanticism and magic. The dewy sheen is particularly surprising considering Cosgrove paints on wood surfaces.

Perhaps it is in part because she paints on a surface so closely aligned to nature that Cosgrove leans toward subject matters relating to the beauty of the great outdoors. With tenderness she paints blades of grass into the grains of the wood. Flowing over the rings and lines in the wood, water depictions retain a motion of fluidity, a rhythmic flow. Her haunting portrait of the moon dramatically plays up light and dark. At 48” by 48”, the paintings’ sizes alone make them stand out. They are large enough to make the viewer feel as if they have the ability to step right into the painting and enter a world of wonder and beauty.

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"Kristen"

"January Birch"

Gernot Kissel

Artist Page

Gernot Kissel's stylized figurative works capture the feminine mystique with deftness and precision. His compositions center on the female gaze, encapsulating a fierceness of character not seen since Kees van Dongen's bewitching "Woman in a Black Hat." Kissel's still lifes and landscapes are strong and bold expressionist works executed with vibrant color and stark line. "His female figures have a direct and powerful sensuality and force the observer to admire them," in all their intensity. Passionate and audacious, these women look out from within the frames of the compositions with unapologetic and electrifying stares, daring and mystifying the viewer. Though he is deserving of comparison to the great German Expressionists of the early 20th century, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Alexey von Jawlensky, his heroines have an unparallel and uncompromising contemporaneity.

Gernot Kissel, born 1939 in Worms on the Rhine, Germany, was an Engineer and Architect. A self taught painter, he started painting at 18 and has been painting ever since. His works have been exhibited across Europe and can be found in museums, galleries and private collections across Europe.

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"Nude on White Cushion"

"Natalie"

Solace Among the Ruins

The power of art lies in its ability to communicate to us from an emotional and inspirational perspective. Solace Among the Ruins features an artist who delves into the deeper primal thoughts of the human subconscious. In both a surreal and representational space she transforms human beings into creatures of desire, anguish, confusion and repose. Each image is a highly personal, riveting look into the ongoing process of living

Katrin Alvarez

Artist Page

German artist Katrin Alvarez’s mixed media works are both troubling and engaging, as they combine Salvador Dali’s surreal imagery and the jarring ruptures of Hannah Höch’s Dada collages. Most of Alvarez’s pieces incorporate two- and three-dimensional materials, creating a tension between surface and relief, representation and abstraction. This tension makes her artworks recognizable to a point, yet impossible to interpret completely.

This incongruity in Alvarez’s materials extends to the thematic contents of her work. She uses a surrealist’s vocabulary, dealing in the myths and archetypes of dreams and psychoanalysis. Yet amidst the images of modern society’s melancholy and dark psychic underbelly, Katrin Alvarez incorporates deeply personal narratives. She treats her private issues through her art, all the while appealing to culture-wide problems. Not only do her images depict her inner demons, the disjointed ways she juxtaposes these personal problems with cultural crises suggests that the two are fundamentally related. Representations of her small inner universe always seem to reflect the dynamics of the greater whole.

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"Serenity of Being"

"Streetgirl"