Adela Leibowitz Solos at Gallery 10G

Sunday, 15 April 2007 23:18

New York City - Gallery 10G announces the opening of “Blackwell”, a solo show of new paintings by New York based, Iranian/Romanian artist, Adela Leibowitz.  This will be the artist’s first solo show at Gallery 10G. The works in Leibowitz’s most recent series, Blackwell, continue her idiosyncratic style of painting surreal dreamscapes that depict a mysterious blue world.  In this series, she is inspired by stories told to her by relatives during her last visit to Iran.  By juxtaposing realistically rendered portraits of young girls, animals and other worldly beasts against barren landscapes, Leibowitz is interpreting and recreating the stories relayed to her.

The landscapes and stories are combining the medieval past with visions of the future.  The variation of lush blue hues in each painting serve to lull the adolescent nomadic girls.  At the same time, a darker and more profound message is uncovered through the girl’s exploration and unearthing of their enchanted environments.  Opens 25 April at Gallery 10G until 28 June, 2007.  The world that Leibowitz depicts is the antithesis of conventional fairy tales and fables.  The young girls and women are wanderers picking up more members as they go along.  Although the girls may appear to be in imminent danger or susceptible to the evils of the forests they are roaming, in fact it is to the contrary.  In reality, they are strangely unaware of their surroundings or of any danger.  This naiveté is revealed in The Awakening, where a group of girls come upon a dress with no owner in the middle of the forest.  There is a lump hidden underneath the dress and the young girls are tempted to uncover the whereabouts and mystery or fate of the owner of the dress.  Leibowitz is interested in hierarchy, pecking order and what happens when groups of people with unusually self centered motivations band together for a common purpose.

In The Wanderers, two blonde doppelgangers are transfixed with a vision in the distance out of the range of the viewer’s sight.  There is also an older brunette woman, maybe their guardian, dressed in traditional peasant garb, who is also staring in the same direction.  They are all in a trance-like state as if they cannot believe what they see, yet they are in no rush to escape from it.  Leibowitz has portrayed the girls in what could be a post-Apocalyptic landscape, uninhibited by rules.

In Blackwell, the term given to characterize a strange world, and synonymous to the show’s title, Leibowitz depicts a bound child left aloft over a well, flanked by a cloaked rabbit headed figure and a goat headed figure.  What could pass for a well simultaneously appears as a magician’s hat, and the rabbit holding the child is on the verge of disappearing into it.  These paintings are about persecution and the possibility for redemption. 

Adela Leibowitz is 34 years old. She was born in Hartford, CT and currently lives and works in NYC.  She graduated from FIT in 1998 with a BFA and she received a MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY in 2000.  Her work has been exhibited in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Alabama, Nevada, Washington & California.  She will be featured in a forthcoming group show in Japan, 2007.

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