This exhibition brings two artists together in a visual dialog on the exploration of the human figure in contemporary abstract sculpture and painting. Together, they are dealing with the use of the figure as a metaphor for the human individual desire to become, for human relationships in their desire for passionate expression, and for human experience in its desire to overcome a confused and absurd world.
Laurie Tisch Sussman Gallery and Ceres Gallery in Chelsea. As well, she has taught as an artist in residence in several locations. Her recent series of figurative female sculptures are entitled Stick Figures, which refers to the simplicity of their creation and transformation from basic line drawings in space to sculptural presences.
Their simplicity is paradoxically nullified by the symbolic, iconic and metaphoric qualities that speak to the human condition in its passionate and creative struggle for individual strength and survival in an absurdist world of multiple loss, disenchanted meaning, and conflicting obligation. Her materials merge clay, steel, bronze, stone, dust and ash into powerful human gestures and personal stance. They, individually and collectively, become monumental in their reductivist appearances.
Don Keene is a product of Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and more recently, the graduate program in Studio Art at The College of New Rochelle. Having maintained a residence and studio in Westchester County for many years, he recently relocated to Connecticut while retaining his art teaching job at the Mamaroneck High School. He has become known in this area for his artistic expertise with the human figure both in his own work and in his teaching. Having recent solo shows in the Chappaqua Library Gallery, the Westchester Arts Council, and Piermont's Flywheel Gallery, he has also exhibited in the Walter Wickiser Gallery and Synchronicity Space in New York City. His concerns with the human figure are less illustrative than they are metaphoric. His abstract accumulations of paint and form investigate the relationships we have with our bodies. This investigative dialog he orchestrates deals with how and why human experience is confounded by primordial passion and desire within a free society that confuses sensuality, sexual charged imagery, emotive content, feelings of personal tension and selfconsciousness, and the role of eroticism and pornography. It is the incongruous nature of this content that, for Keene, is in need of exploration. The resultant paintings and drawings on canvas and paper are purportedly abstract yet feel sexual.