Summer ’20 | Exhibition Launch
Thursday, July 23 | Ongoing through September 26
hosted by C. Grimaldis Gallery
Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present its 43rd annual summer exhibition, Summer ’20, featuring contemporary painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and photography.
As the world moves through waves of change, Summer ’20 features work by a number of artists who push the idea that the person is the political. Documentary photographs by Rania Matar depict young Syrian refugees on the streets of Beirut and third-generation Palestinian girls living in the refugee camps of Bourj el-Barajneh, bringing light to the reality of youth existing invisibly within a country unable to embrace them. In an investigation of blurring borders, balancing cultures, and an individual’s handling of forced assimilation, Alfonso Fernandez creates paintings which combine abstract and figurative content to understand both the world around him and painting itself.
In a similar voyage for self-revelation, Beverly McIver’s narrative and autobiographical paintings explore her identity as an artist and as an African American. McIver challenges cultural assumptions about race and identity, from her earlier self-portraits in white face and black face confronting the black stereotype, to the unmasking of her own skin and body. Zoë Charlton has also dedicated her practice to the representation of black women, focusing on their sexualization to investigate race, power, and gender. Charlton’s collages feature figure drawing, magazine cutouts of nude bodies, and found stickers of both loaded cultural symbols and lush flora. Thinking about the similarities between the act of drawing and the reality of historical symbolism, Jackie Milad creates works on paper which utilize intense color, deconstructed language, and regenerative materials as reference for her experience in the world as an Egyptian-Honduran-American. And from the ultimate advocate for individualism and freedom of expression, Summer ’20 includes print photography by John Waters, whose work examines the distance between fine art, entertainment, and the human experience. No matter the medium, Waters is a teller of stories. His stories give us raw depictions of queer identity, racial inequality, and class dysphoria.
Summer ’20 also highlights work which gives space for formal appreciation and meditation. The “infinite void’ light sculptures by Chul Hyun Ahn, the sleek metal castings by John Ruppert, the dense charcoal fields of Carol Miller Frost’s drawings, and the haunting horizon lines in Ben Marcin’s photographs give us a place to think about form and aesthetics in conversation with themes of identity and culture. Korean artist Jae Ko creates mesmerizing sculptures from rolled paper referencing cultural forms and patterns found in nature. With influence from the Bauhaus and her studies in Berlin, Greek photographer Dimitra Lazaridou projects an urban landscape in the absence of human presence. Nora Sturges presents us with paintings which, even at their small scale, immerse the viewer in a mystifying spatial context inspired by medieval Italian frescoes and abstracted landscapes. And in an opposing scale, Carol Brown Goldberg’s paintings confront the viewer with a massive world of Sci-fi flora, continuously entwined to build tension and chaos.
Summer ’20 is on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery from July 16 to September 26, 2020. In lieu of a reception, a virtual version of the exhibition will launch on Thursday, July 23rd.
