Anis Dargaa
The French Perspective: Contemporary Art from France
June 29 - July 20, 2010
Reception:
Thursday July 1, 2010 6-8 PM
Press Release
Blending together the human and the animal, Anis Dargaa brings to life strange worlds of birth and creation. Visions of femininity and fertility emerge as curving trunks, tusks, and profiles of elephants morph into deities and encircling symbols of eternity. His works are both timeless and modern, blurring the boundaries between mankind and nature, the spiritual and the sensual. Inspired by Salvador Dali and by his mentor Paul Pabri, Dargaa employs a traditional chiaroscuro method of contrasting shadow and light to his surrealistic art. Dargaa paints in the style of the great Renaissance masters, applying hand-mixed powdered pigments and oils to smooth linen covered panels with soft brushes of the finest sable. His sculptures capture the visual vocabulary of his paintings in glowing bronze.
Since his debut in Belgium at age 17, over the past 20 years Dargaa has received much praise on the world stage, including acquisition of his work by the Museum of Walloon Art in Liege and recognition by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Artist Statement
Surrealism and symbolism are the components that make up my artistic universe. I use the symbolic objects that surround me because those are the ones which inspire me. They appear to me merged into each other and seem to naturally come together to form a Surrealist object. My painting technique is that of the great masters of the Renaissance. I work using chiaroscuro (the art of shadow and light) that gives my work a certain realism. To achieve the end result, I work with the finest materials available for my style - painting brushes of sable hair, linen canvas mounted on a wood frame, linseed oil and powders of pure pigments.
Invitation to the exhibition
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Artists in this exhibition
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