Gallery Walk Date: Friday, August 5th 5-8pm

Gary Komarin

Gary Komarin's paintings walk the line between expression and avoidance of reason. Komarin's layering of paint in child-like form, conveys beauty that is not limited by the constructs of language. Although abstract, Komarin's paintings sometimes contain shapes that are quite legible - a wig or a hat, for instance - but more often they tend to suggest many things without getting specific about any of them. In conversation, the artist is not eager to make them any more specific. The forms resonate when they are at once strange and familiar.

Born in Manhattan in 1951, the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer who fled the Holocaust, Gary Komarin received a graduate teaching fellowship at Boston University where he studied with Philip Guston. Komarin was offered his first University teaching position at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in 1978. He has subsequently taught at The University of Oregon, Southern Methodist University, and The University of Iowa.

Komarin received The Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting in 1999. He has also received the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, The Elizabeth Foundation, New York Grant in Painting, The Rutgers University Fellowship in Innovative Printmaking, a Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Philip Hulitar Award in Painting in 1988. He has been exhibiting his work here in the US and abroad since 1979 and in galleries around the world. Komarin's work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, and the Newark Museum as well as the Kunst Art in Zurich. Komarin's paintings are in numerous private, corporate, and museum collections including: Microsoft, AT&T, The Nordstrom Corporation, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Montclair Museum among others.

Robert Polidori

Robert Polidori is one of the world's most acclaimed photographers of human habitats and environments. His career began in the mid 1980s when he won permission to document the restoration of the Château de Versailles, beginning a love affair with the palace that has continued to this day. He has since documented sites across the world and is currently a staff photographer for The New Yorker. He was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 2006, to photograph New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the subsequent exhibition drew the largest audience of any of the museum's photography shows to date.

Some photographers are in love with the process of taking a picture. Psychologically, I’m more interested in the situations that taking the picture puts me through, and what it forces me to witness. I really do it because I want that picture. It’s like I’m collecting evidence, like a detective looking to solve a case. I don’t mean that literally, but I use it as a simile. It’s a thing about phenomena and asking questions. And answering some, but not answering all of them. - Robert Polidori

Robert Polidori's books include: Points Between...Up Till Now (a selection of photos Havana, Chernobyl and Versailles), Havana, Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, Versailles, After the Flood (images from Katrina), Parcours Museoloqipue Revisite, Metropolis.

Luis Gonzales Palma

Luis Gonzales Palma use of symbolism and collage with his photography, intensifies the story and deep intensity of the moment he has captured. Whether it is in the soulful eyes of a girl facing you straight on, or the dream-like essence of a memory gone by, Palma pulls you in with a haunting glimpse of the human condition. His photographs, done on Orthochromatic film, speak to the matters of the spirit and of things eternal.

Luis Gonzales Palma is one of Latin American's most significant contemporary photographers. Born in Guatemala, trained as an architect, Gonzales Palma turned to photography in the mid 1980s.

Solitude, pain and loveform the basis of Gonzales Palma's art. In each work, the viewer is confronted with a gried that echoes through time. Tranporting Guatemalan natives, his relatives, servants and father into a timeless, universal plane, Gonzales Palma intersects the past and the present. These images transform the work from portraiture into the realm of iconographic metaphors. Gonzales Palma dramatically manipulates the texture of his prints, thickly layering them with oil point or watercolor washes and distressing them to give them a worn, antique feeling. These photographs have rich, dark and mysterious surfaces. The overall sepia color of Gonzales Palma's images suggests history; the white remaining in the images tends to lie in the eyes, a rope or a crown of paper flowers on an elderly woman's head. The searing white eyes engage and challenge the viewer.

Palma's work is in the collections of: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; The Australian Centre for Photography, Australia; Palacio de Bellas Arts of Mexico; The Royal Festival Hall in London Palazzon Ducale di Genova, Italy; Museums and Castignino MACRO Rosario; Bratislave in Slovakia; Les Rencontres d'Arles in France; PhotoEspana in Madrid; Singapore; Bogota, Sao Paulo; and Carcas among others.

He has participated in group shows such as 49 and 50 Venice Biennale, Fotobienal de Vigo, XXIII Bienal of Sao Paulo, Brazil; V Havana Biennial; the Ludwig Forum for International Kunst in Aachen, Germany; The Taipei Art Museum in Korea; Musuem of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Daros Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland; Palacio del Conde Duque in Madrid, Spain, and the Fargfabriken in Stockholm, Sweden.

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