For Immediate Release For Further Information,
please contact “SUMMER ELIXIR” IS A VISUAL RIOTOUS DELIGHT Woodbury, CT - Fenn Gallery announces “A Summer Elixir”, a three artist exhibition featuring the thoroughly hip sculpture of John Monti, along with the cooly graceful canvases of Julie Gross and Michele Katen. The show runs from Wed., June 28th - Sun., August 6, 2006. The public is invited to the Artist Reception on Sat., July 8th from 4-6 pm. Contemporary sculptor John Monti works at the confluence of Pop, Minimalism and the Decorative Arts. His sumptuously candy colored wall and floor sculptures in such iconic forms as freestanding “smiles”, ellipses, arabesques, asterisks and rosettes are irrepressibly gleeful. Composed of state-of-the-art synthetics - polycarbonte plastic, resin, urethane rubber and fiberglass, his playful, buoyant work looks as if it would soar into space were it not stuck to the walls. Monti is a Professor of Fine Arts, and is the Sculpture Coordinator at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. His work has been acclaimed by such publications as the New York Times, Art in America, and Sculpture Magazine. He is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery, among many others. The lively and elegant geometric abstraction paintings of Julie Gross are choreographs of fluid networks of circles, swirls and teardrops, which bump up against and overlap each other in a positive/negative dance. The forms on Gross’s canvases serve as vessels for discerning combinations of unmodulated color, and much visual pleasure derives from the way color seeps into the crevices between shapes. There is no suggestion of atmospheric perspective, so that subject and ground continually alternate, while her bubble slices seem to continue off the canvas. Ms. Gross has exhibited regularly in New York City for 30 years, and teaches 2-D Design at Parsons School of Design, New York. Connecticut native and Lyme Academy Fine Art graduate
Michele Katen is an emerging artist who’s current focus is
painting suburban scenes that combine architectural elements from
the 1950’s with women and children. Her striking, faceless
figures set against lusciously applied broad brushed backgrounds
are created with a conscious ambiguity, inviting viewers to interpret
her work on a more personal level. Her paintings communicate a vision
of American norms and ideals, while simultaneously questioning identity
and conformity in modern society. The use of handmade oil paint
on primed linen enhances the personal aspect of her work. Her painting
“Yellow Lounge Chair” received the Silvermine Board
of Trustees Award at the “56th Annual Art of the Northeast
Competition”. ### |
