Stephen Haller Gallery shows ' COLOR '

Friday, 27 July 2007 23:14

NEW YORK CITY - Stephen Haller Gallery is proud to announce the opening of COLOR! – a group exhibition of gallery and invited artists exploring contemporary artist’s use of color. Works in painting, sculpture, collage, mixed media, and photography are included as well as a nod to the phenomenon of synesthesia. The exhibition introduces to the gallery the work of PAUL SARKISIAN and includes work by artists such as JOHANNES GIRARDONI, German artists ROBERT JANITZ and RAINER GROSS, British artist SAM JURY, LARRY ZOX and others. Thru August 3rd.

The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see the work of Paul Sarkisian in the intimate environment of a gallery setting. Sarkisian’s diverse practice is familiar to the art world from exhibitions at Documenta the Whitney Museum, and Site Santa Fe. This exhibit previews his upcoming one-person exhibition at the gallery later in the season. Sarkisian experiments with color in this series exploring the act of seeing. Alternating opacity, translucency, and iridescence he invites the viewer to actively engage in the work by discovering that what appears to be a single luminous color is transformed to a myriad of shifting colors by changes in the viewer’s perspective and light.

While color is most often associated with surface, in the work of Austrian artist Johannes Girardoni the material is the color and the color the material. In Girardoni’s wax and wood constructions color is “built” layer over layer of pigment into wax, each fusing with the previous layer resulting in one color body. The viewer’s perception of the color results from light mixing with matter – the wax suspends pigment, allowing light to circulate around the pigment and penetrate into matter - the sculpture thus becomes the carrier of an explicitly painterly phenomenon.

In his oil and mixed media work French artist Michel Alexis explores the phenomenon of synesthesia through his own instinctive associations of letters and color. Synesthesia is an automatic joined sensation, a physical experience for some individuals in which one sense triggers an additional perception in another sense - such as color in response to a letter or number.

A gifted colorist (and a star of the color movement of the 60's and 70's) the late painter Larry Zox distinguished himself among the artists of his generation who sought to analyze painting as a thing in itself and to experiment with the reductive purity of color, line, and form. Exuberant dynamic color and surprising juxtapositions characterize Zox’s signature style – the splicing of a color field to give the sensation of shifting planes. Critic John Goodrich wrote in the New York Sun, “the painting brims with arguments about symmetry and its violations. But the elemental exuberance of its colors defies categorization, their footloose energy competing intriguingly with the deliberateness of the design."

British artist Sam Jury's diverse practice is represented by a hauntingly beautiful photograph. Sculpting a blank head and projecting images then photographing and re-photographing faces from time present and time past she debunks portraiture by creating the image of a woman who is no one and everyone. Her rich painterly colors suggest a face surfacing through liquid or memory.

The Stephen Haller Gallery has evolved over 25 years. We strongly believe that a gallery should have a vision and an identity. In our search for artists over many years, the gallery has brought together a group of artists from different parts of the world that have a similar vision and sensibility. Visit Stephen Haller Gallery at : www.stephenhallergallery.com