April 30th to May 29th
Opening April 30th 2pm to 5pm
Followed by a potluck
The Re Institute begins the 2016 season, in the upstairs space, with drawings and paintings by Harry Kramer. Harry will be showing a collection of works that span a 40-year period of his creative output. The connections between the relatively quick execution of the drawings and the immense process of finding that the multiyear paintings hold will be stunning. The process of producing art is the stage for these masterful artifacts.
The downstairs space will house the work of Joel Schapira. Making his 70th trip around the sun, Joel is still deeply engaged in making art and is devoted to its gifts, to what he feels are its healing powers. Yet the timely question has arrived: What is to become of all his good work? The creations artists make want to touch and teach us but, to do so, they need to find us and come home with us to live. Joel will be continuing his engagement in the process of art making by hoping to find, among visitors to the gallery, those who will accept his gifts and give his creations the good homes they need. In the downstairs space, Joel will be giving away (almost) all his paintings, drawings, collages, and assemblages. Please come by, talk with the artist, take some art…….. it’s all free.
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Harry Kramer
A Song Not Sung
2003
Oil on canvas
60"x 72" |
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Harry Kramer Click Here To See The Show
Drawing is the bones in painting. The rhythmic relationships, structure, geometry, and movement in nature ultimately influence the form and imagery in my painting. Sometimes the work is more abstract, sometimes less so. This doesn’t matter to me. I have no stance regarding figuration or abstraction – what is, is.
If painting is a correspondence for what is found in nature it needs to be as unpredictable and account for the light through color. The physicality of paint makes the painting an object rather than a picture of objects.
In no way do I reject any of the traditions and methods used in the past. Painting is a difficult process. It can sometimes take several years for me to complete a series of paintings and I look for inspiration wherever I can find it. Aside from nature, and what seems to be an obvious connection to Abstract Expressionism, almost anyone in the history of painting from Giotto, to Cezanne, to Morandi, to Giacometti are influences.
There is a tendency to read art as an arithmetical progression. It is not. It exists as a continuum. It tells us it didn’t begin today, weaving around since the first person put the first stroke on a cave wall. It is about the past, the present and the future — in no particular order. The avant-garde exists for critics and historians, not for painters.
Click here for a Bio of Harry Kramer and two more images of his work.
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Joel Schapira
Wolfteeth Evermore, Again . |
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Click Here To See The Work In It's New Homes
In sunflower sutra, Allen Ginsberg says: you were never no locomotive, sunflower. You were a sunflower!
More than 50 years ago, when the artist was a boy, he sold coffee beans in his father's store to a man wearing a tweed jacket and a reddish beard. The man leaving, almost at the door, turned to the boy and said: beware the compensatory psychological attributals. Now maybe you could ignore such a warning, but the boy artist, having recently seen the Guernica, did not. The artist, looking back, can say that the boy, now grown old, made this spell the heart of his artistic journey. For the longest time, without always realizing it, it has kept him honest and helped him to face, head on, the losses that accrue from succumbing to the temptations of compensation. And what is the flowering path that's spread itself out before the artist, when he says no thanks to the compensatory? Faithfulness, truth, fullness, revision, compassion, revelation, tenderness, and the return of innocence. Here comes Joel Schapira's great (and good) art giveaway... almost everything must go.
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