BALTIMORE, MD - C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present its 46th annual summer group exhibition, Summer '23, featuring contemporary painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture.
The work of Eugene Leake (1911-2005) guides us through rural landscapes and atmospheric painting, while Grace Hartigan’s (1922-2008) washes of color blend together figurative content with the artist’s signature sensibility of vibrant color, active gesture, and painterly freedom. The sculptures of Jane Manus and Anthony Caro (1924-2013) converse on ideas of material and form within abstraction. Manus’ aluminum designs nod to pop and the figure with bright colors and strong lines, punctuating the space they occupy, while Caro’s improvisational welding composes forms that find harmony in fortuitous line and shape.
Summer ‘23 showcases work from Erin Fostel’s Bedroom Series as it depicts the inside of women’s bedrooms. Devoid of the figure, these charcoal drawings ask the viewer to imagine those not shown and ruminate on the correlations to their own personal environments. The delicacy and labor with which these exclusive interiors are drawn documents the owner in a way that is free of the objectification that awaits her in the outside world. With similar attention to space and time, Ben Marcin and Alexey Titarenko tell stories of culture, memory, and environment through carefully considered photographs. Titarenko’s poetic images use long exposure and motion blur to build upon traditional notions of street photography, while Marcin’s equally haunting tableaus feature structures that act as markers for the larger forces at work in American Culture. Sourcing from a personal idea of place, Greek outsider artist Giorgos Rigas (1921-2014) painted from memory the life and activities in the mountain village and seascapes of his childhood - effectively commemorating a life that no longer exists.
Like pieces of recalled and constructed memory, Heejo Kim’s enchanting paintings depict vibrantly molten bodies huddled together in moments of domesticity and candor. Kim’s use of color and light illuminates, confronts, and sometimes hides portions of narrative, while her figures exist with a quiet brazen in their portrayal of the familiar. Bill Schmidt’s systematic shapes and haloed lines produce strict figure-ground relationships, relating to each other and to the surface in a way that seems so organic. Approaching the space between abstraction and representation, Christopher Batten examines race, inequity, and lived experience through gesture and symbolism. And Korean artist, Chul-Hyun Ahn, creates sculptural “voids” which act as optical and bodily illusions of infinity - bridging the gap between conscious and unconscious space though the poetics of emptiness and luminosity.
