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Agora Art Gallery – Contemporary Art Dealers

October 1 - 21, 2008
Reception: Thursday, October 02, 2008, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

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

Gladys Baccalàx10  Matei Enric  Ulf M  Christian Nicklaus  Emma Coyle  Patricia Herz Deahl  Berenice Michelow  
Pari Ravan  Pinar Selimoglu  Mandy Munroe  Ana Maria Postigo  Dalia Rubin  

A Symphony of Symbolism

A Symphony of Symbolism is an extraordinary selection of works that speak to us through their unique styles and unusual materials and techniques. In this grouping are artists that do not rely on conventional imagery, but expound their worldviews in their own individual terms. Beholding the beauty of these works and interpreting their meanings is an exciting personal journey of discovery.

Gladys Baccalàx10

Gladys Baccalàx10Gladys Baccalàx10

Swiss illustrator Gladys Baccalà creates intimate portraits in a stark expressive mode that combines multiple art-making methods. Though she begins her works in pencil and tempera, much of her practice is also accomplished digitally. The result is a hybrid style melding age-old methods with computer technology to achieve a visual style that is visually timeless yet very contemporary in its content. Her human figures are sharply defined while their surroundings remain flat, vague and weathered, evoking the portraiture style of Egon Schiele. However, the similarities between Baccalà’s characters and the Austrian artist’s tortured souls are fleeting.

 

There is an endearing sense of humor and empathy in Gladys Baccalà’s subjects, a level of understanding that gives them depth but also allows them to speak to the viewer. The alternately plump, pencil-thin and angular bodies – many which are partially concealed or hidden – portray a compromised relationship between interior and exterior, between personal space and public life. These archetypal figures whose faces are often unreadable convey emotion through embodiment.

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Disconnected
"Disconnected"

Jelly Belly Swing
"Jelly Belly Swing"

Matei Enric

Matei EnricMatei Enric

Matei Enric's paintings combine the techniques of easel and wall painting, creating images which both integrate and create an aesthetic environment of symbolism and intrigue. Enric draws on varied influences, including Byzantine painting and modern masters such as Malevich, Klee or Mondrian. The assemblage-like works create a scene by integrating their background: "Space circumscribes the work; the wall (the vital space around the picture) is inserted in the piece of work, becoming in this way an element of the composition." The compositions reveal fluid natural rhythms as well as materializing a fusion between visual geometry and linguistic communication.


Enric was born and studied art restoration in Romania and currently resides in Bucharest. He has exhibited his works across Romania in both group and solo shows, has restored many works of classical and ancient painting, and taken part in scenography for shows in Romania and France. His paintings can be found in private collections in Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Italy, and the United States.

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The Holy Crime
"The Holy Crime"

Red Moon
"Red Moon"

Ulf M

Ulf MUlf M

The characters in Norwegian painter Ulf M's work are completely at home in their surreal environments. They have an apparent awe for the world around them and they inhabit the paintings as if inhabiting eternal dreamscapes. Influenced by eerie symbolist painter Edvard Munch and vocalist Edith Piaf, Ulf M has a penchant for intense colors and dramatic scenes. He often depicts quite moments, in which figures are meditatively alone or surrounded by intimate crowds. Yet the vibrancy of his colors and the attention Ulf M pays to lighting make intimacy seem glamorous. The folk tales and woodsy environments that defined Ulf M's childhood shape his work. His paintings have the epic quality of mythology and he often glorifies nature's attributes.

 

Awarded the Art Idol prize during Stamsund International Art Festival in 2004, Ulf M has recently enjoyed national success as an artist. His owns his own gallery in Stamsund and exhibits a permanent collection of his work.

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Nord Lys
"Nord Lys"

Whale Tale in New York
"Whale Tale in New York"

Christian Nicklaus

Christian NicklausChristian Nicklaus

Long Island-based artist Christian Nicklaus cites his Celtic roots as an important influence, and that iconography is certainly prominent. Knotted, serpentine creatures occupy many of his mixed-media canvases, forming a dense web that sometimes overwhelms other visual elements. But if cultural heritage informs this facet of his work, many other features of Nicklaus’s artistic vocabulary are culled from personal experience. His contorted Celtic creatures cohabitate with techniques informed by extensive training in printmaking, Intaglio etching, graffiti-informed writing and drippings, pasted photographs and text, and cartoon-inspired figures. This rich assortment of symbols conveys elaborate and often conflicting meanings. They appear to float in frequently-intersecting planes over alternating backgrounds of red, blue and earth tones, thereby adding one more emotive cue to the mix. Indeed, this distinctly postmodern collision of disparate aesthetic codes offers an opportunity to viewers to learn an engaging new language. 

Christian Nicklaus received his MFA in Printmaking from Marywood University, in Scranton, PA. He has had numerous solo and group shows and his work has been featured in several publications.

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The Author of War and Peace: Tolstoy
"The Author of War and Peace: Tolstoy"

What Is and What Should Never Be
"What Is and What Should Never Be"


The Persistence of Form

The versatility displayed in the works of The Persistence of Form underscores the idea that as long as people dream and imagine art will never cease to exist, inspire, and bring about contemplation in others. These talented artists bring their thoughts and feelings to reality in a stunning variety of styles and forms that will touch audiences long after viewing the painting.

Emma Coyle

Emma CoyleEmma Coyle

Emma Coyle raises issues of female beauty, identity and desirability through her Pop Art paintings of pale-skinned, posing fashionistas. With a Warholian focus on haute couture's surface beauty, Emma's work evokes glamour stripped of its sheen; she invites us to see these women with a more critical eye. The result is art which brightly parades its bold colors, spare composition and strong line. The facial features of her subjects are subsumed by their attitude, and are noteworthy mostly for their similarity--lips are all the same pulpy red, and similar eyes are lined by short but spiky lashes--as if these languid personas achieved full life only through their fashions. Emma has given these stylish women not identities so much as presented them in the varying roles that consumer society imposes on women.

Through subtle yet scathing irony, Emma Coyle's work provides a commentary about dictums on beauty, which are just as seductive and overpowering as the colors in which they are portrayed in these disarming works.

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Zero 17#
"Zero 17#"

Zero 15#
"Zero 15#"

Patricia Herz Deahl

Patricia Herz DeahlPatricia Herz Deahl

Patricia Herz Deahl, over a lifetime career in the arts, has ranged widely across form and material. She has used media from standard to exotic and she has painted large and small. What has reasserted itself throughout the years is landscape. Sometimes the earth’s features abstract themselves into symbols of nature, and other times they relax into a representational romance. This conflict between forms of vision is echoed in the landscape itself.  Herz Deahl says that her preoccupation is with the meeting of sky and ground.  Solving that head-on confrontation at the horizon provides her reason to paint. She wants for us beauty that we do not have to question. She wants for us a place to rest.

A New York artist, Deahl has a Bachelor of Science degree from SUNY New Paltz and a Masters in Studio Art from the College of New Rochelle. She has been exhibiting her work nationally, though primarily in New York, for over forty years.

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Seen Moments Ago
"Seen Moments Ago"

Where Is Near
"Where Is Near"

Berenice Michelow

Berenice MichelowBerenice Michelow

Berenice Michelow’s stunning works on canvas and paper provide relevant and meaningful commentaries on contemporary life with a blend of hyperrealistic and abstract styles.  By synthesizing her abstract roots with a new naturalism, Michelow crafts meaningful works of art which express undeniable political themes and socially aware messages.   When combined with the sheer virtuosity of her draftsmanship and skillful technique, Michelow’s works become a powerful document of the artist’s observations and emotions concerning the world around her.  By juxtaposing realistic subjects against abstracted backgrounds, Michelow gives her works a tenuous and poetic impression, as though envisioned from a fading memory.  As we peer into her works, we attempt to recapture the images within our collective consciousness, images imbued with the important issues of our past and present.

Internationally celebrated artist Berenice Michelow has shown throughout her native South Africa, Chile, and the United States and is included in a number of important private and corporate collections.  She currently lives and works in the United States.

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Pathways 1
"Pathways 1"

Pathways 2
"Pathways 2"

Pari Ravan

Pari RavanPari Ravan

Technically linked to the Old Masters, my pictures can be classified as Romantic Surrealism, influenced by the tiles of Iranian architecture, Persian stories and my love for flowers and poetry. The key thing, though, is that my pictures tell stories, the titles of which are intentionally chosen to provide a key for entering them. However, the unmistakable meaning slowly starts to unravel, since in my paintings none of the tales are really told to the end. It is left to the observer. It is only for him to bring the story to a conclusion. My art should guide the spectator to his own emotions and experience and results. There are as many possibilities to come to a conclusion as spectators exist.

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Tree in the Winter
"Tree in the Winter"

Cyclamens
"Cyclamens"

Pinar Selimoglu

Pinar SelimogluPinar Selimoglu

Pinar Selimoglu's fiery mixed media works record the reverberations of events and emotions in life. Graceful, fluid motions are recorded in sweeping brushstrokes that are then layered upon by convulsive marks and spatters. Selimoglu's work is about freedom of expression, summoning the subconscious to pour out without being impeded by forethought or planning. "I'm tuning myself into my unlimited subtle emotions through meditation and prayings and then let it go" she states. The result is an ephemeral vision brought to life, where brooding colors inflect repose while flitting strokes of crimson and ochre highlight energy in the composition.

Her process creates a stunning variety of textures and variations of color, appearing smeared, scraped and splattered onto the surface of paper, canvas or collage. Steering clear of overt representation, the stylized application of color becomes the mouthpiece of the work, speaking to audiences directly with raw intensity. Currently preparing for several group and solo exhibitions, Selimoglu's career in the arts is gaining momentum. She lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Untitled 10
"Untitled 10"

Untitled 7
"Untitled 7"


The Texture of Space

Beautiful color and dynamic forms are infused with emotive possibilities through the art of abstraction. The artists included in The Texture of Space build their compositions with space in mind, to set the spirit free with fluid organic shapes or dazzle and intrigue us with intricate geometric configurations. Fans of contemporary painting will enjoy the inventive and original character of these works.

Mandy Munroe

Mandy MunroeMandy Munroe

Mandy Munroe’s images, although abstract, bring to mind the grittiness of an urban landscape. Bold geometric shapes dominate her canvas the way architecture defines a city.  Rectangles are erected like looming skyscrapers and busy factories.  Thick curved lines swoop like overpasses, creating movement as they drive the viewer’s eyes across the works. This industrial look is further echoed in Munroe’s stark color palette. Blacks and grays control the works, with browns, tans, and dirty blues acting as accents.  The subdued colors are mainly solid or slightly mottled, similar to the metal and concrete that make up a city.  Although the interplay of shapes and colors suggests a familiar setting, there is nothing definitive in the subject matter of these artworks.  The shapes crisscross the canvas, dissecting the space itself into abstract shapes for the viewer to interpret. 

Mandy Munroe's works have been exhibited in Britain, Europe and the USA.

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Meet
"Meet"

Elevation
"Elevation"

Ana Maria Postigo

Ana Maria PostigoAna Maria Postigo

Madrid-based Andalusian artist Ana Maria Postigo works at the border between two and three dimensional art, where painting and sculpture overlap. Postigo molds three dimensional forms then paints them, recontextualizing abstract expressionism’s boldly applied paint swaths. This blending of media and methods attests to her formal training in decorative arts and furniture restoration. Similarly, her use of colors is both sculptural and painterly. Pools of bright tones swirl and drip from low-relief ruptures in some works; giant streams of paint pour down other canvas’s surfaces; elsewhere paints flow over one another, fissuring like tectonic plates.

 

By rupturing her works’ surfaces, Postigo dramatizes two artistic styles colliding. On one hand, her planes of stark white or warm earth tones evoke Kazimir Malevich’s abstracted geometrics. Meanwhile, bursts of color disturbing these surfaces evoke the generous paint application of abstract expressionists like Jean-Paul Riopelle. Postigo’s work, then, articulates a tension between the absolute reason of starkly abstracted canvases, and the repressed energies roiling below their surfaces.

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Ingenuo nº 4.
"Ingenuo nº 4."

Ingenuo nº 2.
"Ingenuo nº 2."

Dalia Rubin

Dalia RubinDalia Rubin

Dalia Rubin's stunning paintings re-imagine the natural world as a tranquil display of textures and forms in beautiful equilibrium. Her works conceptualize and rearrange organic shapes, while also allowing them to maintain their character: plant life still pushes through stone in these paintings, or reaches for sunlight, or floats on sea-green waves, yet with an austerity counterpoised by the lush colors that Rubin brings forth through her brushwork. Additionally, Rubin eschews creating the illusion of three-dimensional space on her canvases. Instead, her plants, stones, water, and sun are presented in stylized portraits that make powerful use of the canvas's vertical and horizontal spaces.

This is the silent, natural world we too often take for granted, and these works are more than still-lifes, more than arrangements of color and shape; with a daring mix of symmetry and abstraction, Dalia Rubin distills the universe of organic life down to its forms and textures, then raises it up for our contemplation, a world both new and intimately familiar.

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Peacock
"Peacock"

Abstract 6
"Abstract 6"

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