Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer - The remarkable sculptures created by German artist Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer powerfully express an energetic gravity and intensity heightened by their archaic appearance. Adorned with tribal headdresses and medallions, these figures are the vessels of a sacred knowledge, seeking to transport the viewer to an elevated awareness. "These figures are totemic in aspect and the narratives are indirect and internal. The stories they contain are in fact archetypal ones and require an effort of self-recognition and serious introspection of the part of the viewer," writes Matthias Ostermann, art critic.
Schnitzenbaumer masterfully blends ceramic and metallic materials, thereby creating surfaces resembling decaying and oxidized metals or raw clay, adding to the archeological aura of each piece. "Schniztenbaumer does not have the inhibitions that many other ceramic artists suffer from. She adds wood and steel with great ease, coloring all the components to look like unfired clay or exposed metal. The reason is this: she is not making statements about ceramics or about clay as a material, as potters love to do, but about the poetic quality of ancient forms," comments Donald Locke, regular contributor to Creative Loafing.
Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer has exhibited throughout Germany, France, and the United States, including numerous shows with the Bill Lowe Gallery since 1992. She was an art professor at Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich, Germany for 10 years.
Hyunmee Lee - Korean-born abstract painter Hyunmee Lee masterfully couples bold, expressive brushstrokes with soft, subdued fields of color, thereby creating a strikingly beautiful balance in composition and design. "Confronting the paintings of Hyunmee Lee, what impresses is their celebration of gesture and depiction of a nearly unlimited sense of space. Abstract and intuitively painterly, her aesthetic is one of immediacy perpetually seeking its own nature," writes Jim Edwards in the catalogue Intimacy Without Restraint: The Gesture Paintings of Hyunmee Lee.
Hyunmee Lee's spontaneous yet deliberate brushstrokes pay homage to her early training in calligraphy during her childhood in Korea. Her use of line is distinctly calligraphic - not only in its pure and crisp execution, but also in its philosophical and artistic intentions. "I have always been more interested in the substance of the brush stroke than its symbolism; I am concentrating on spontaneous gestures," Hyunmee Lee writes. "My work is a contemplation of the spirit as it embarks on to the canvas and a conscious and unconscious step toward "Big Mind," the Buddhist concept of meditation resulting in a Zen-like form of enlightenment and connectedness to nature and the universe."
In addition to showing with the Bill Lowe Gallery, Hyunmee Lee's work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Seoul, Korea, and Sydney, Australia. She earned an MFA in the Visual Arts through the University of Sydney in Australia, and a BFA in Painting from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. Hyunmee Lee is a professor of art at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah.
