Reception: Friday, March 5, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Sharon Booma: Still Remained in Plain View. Awarded top prizes in juried exhibitions and sought by collectors internationally, the artist’s abstract mixed media paintings pursue a rigorous balance between states of chaos and order. On view from March 5 through March 28, her latest exhibition at LewAllen Galleries’ Downtown venue will feature new works that transfigure personal artifacts and natural materials into the principal elements of a profoundly expressive and highly individualized visual language.

Hybridizing the methodologies of Arte Povera and Abstract Expressionism, Booma’s newest series of paintings engenders a dramatic collision between the untended and the consummately prepared. Embracing the modesty of such materials as string, pumice, and weathered hardware appropriated from sites that define the artist’s personal history, the deeply resonant paintings on display in Still Remained in Plain View elevate the commonplace into a foundation for the evocation of both nostalgia and sublimity. Tempering a bracing physicality with the exquisite lyricism of harmonized painterly gestures, her new works further extend the remarkable artistic range of a leading talent within contemporary abstraction.

Educated at the College of New Rochelle, NY, and the University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts, Booma has been exhibiting her work since 1986. The artist is celebrated for her ability to achieve equilibrium in each of her compositions by means of a meticulous synchronization of superficially disharmonious elements inclusive of incendiary color fields, elemental geometrics, deeply layered oils, and diverse mixed media applied to panel or paper. Controlled by the structural boundaries imposed by both the canvas and the painted forms themselves, the effect is that of a carefully realized harmony sustained with razor-sharp precision.