This year Claire Oliver Gallery brings the Art Miami visitor a significant, four-person exhibition of new works by Andy Denzler, Andrew Erdos, Beth Lipman and Jazz-minh Moore.
Sunlight Melting into Sand
Hand blown, silverized glass, acrylic two-way mirror; colored, computerized LEDs
Andrew Erdos
Moot
Acrylic and resin on birch panel
Jazz-minh Moore
Shells, Urns, Basket of Fruit, Books
Autumn Dew
Oil on canvas
Andy Denzler
Jessica Joslin | Bat-bird Hatpin
Antique hardware, brass, bone, silver, steel, glove leather
3 x 4.5 x 2.75 inches
In presenting Beyond Bling: The Artist as Jeweler, Claire Oliver Gallery stays true to its commitment to challenge, dazzle, and surprise the viewer with works of art that require examination, contemplation, and interaction; the intellectual connection between the observer and the work of art is of the utmost importance to the Gallery.
For over four millennia, artists have been considered bellwethers, those soughtafter trendsetters who play a leading role in style and design innovation. This exhibition celebrates jewelry-based artworks that not only resonate on their own, but also transform their wearers.
Beth Lipman | Residue Collar
Argentinium, glass, glue
62 x 16 x 8 inches
For two decades, Claire Oliver Gallery has proven itself to be an institution that champions a dedication to physical process, commitment to craft, and intensity of detail balanced with conceptual content. As such, the Gallery is uniquely poised to invite contemporary mainstays and next generation talent alike to create new works for an important exhibition of wearable artistic innovations. With this exhibition, Claire Oliver Gallery continues its quest to knock down barriers among media and to foster and encourage artists to actualize groundbreaking work.
Beyond Bling is on view from November 29, 2012 – January 12, 2013.
Opening Reception with the Artists: Thursday, November 29, 6-8 pm.
Life in the Fast Lane
Silverpoint drawing on paper
12 x 12 inches | 30.5 x 30.5 cm.
Lori Field’s second solo show at Claire Oliver Gallery ushers viewers into a world of the Artist’s own mythology. Consisting of one hundred new works on paper executed in the medium of silverpoint, this exhibition continues Field’s emphasis on drawing and obsessive detail. Through beautiful, botanical motifs and repeated imagery, the Artist creates a fantasyland backdrop for her cast of imagined characters. She harnesses an intensity in her animal figures’ direct stares and fluid gestures that, in combination with the innocence and beauty of their androgynous and often childlike human attendants, invites a sincere conversation on vulnerability.
The exacting and unforgiving medium of silverpoint forces the hand-eye coordination and focus the Artist seeks. Originally used to make the under-drawings for oil paintings, silverpoint is executed with a metal stylus on a prepared, gessoed surface. Because the stylus’s lines cannot be erased, silverpoint drawing requires a steady hand,concentration, and precision that, for Field, create a meditative state in which her imagination is unlocked. As the silver in the drawing oxidizes, the line ripens from a bright color to a softer, burnished sepia tone. The organic, changing nature of the work is part of the allure for the Artist.
The Artist explains that “by drawing and embroidering tattoos (my metaphor for memory) on my subjects, I suggest an assimilation of culturally inscribed messages. By playing with my own fairy tales, folklore, obsessive symbols, and visual language, the work helps me process my own reactions to our real world and the actual events that shape it.”
The opening reception for the artist is tonight from 6-8pm.
On View:October 25 – November 24, 2012
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The Question That Devours
Stoneware
64 x 35 x 25 inches | 162.6 x 89 x 63.5 cm.
In ”Come Undone,” the new body of work by sculptor Beth Cavener Stichter, the Artist cleverly selects animal forms as human surrogates. Using their nonthreatening images, devoid of specified associations, she is able to convey relatable stories and emotions we might otherwise dismiss out of hand. In these seductive, large-scale works made from clay, Cavener Stichter cajoles the viewer into looking at the darker side of the human condition by cloaking it in animal skin. Her subjects elicit empathy, expressing complex emotions and relationships while permitting us to finally examine humanity closely enough to fully consider it — and to connect on a rare personal level.
Cavener Stichter creates frank discussions with her viewer through anthropomorphic sculpture and a dispassionate objectification of her subjects. She is cognizant of the danger that the realism of her creatures and her deliberate choice of a “Martha Stewart color palette” can encourage: the worst kind of sentimentality. The Artist hopes that by inducing the viewer to acknowledge their own uncomfortable darker side, she can inspire a greater understanding of those disparities that divide our societies today. “The figures are feral and uneasy,” she says, “expressing frustration for the human tendency towards cruelty and lack of understanding. Entangled in their own internal and external struggles, my figures are engaged with the subjects of fear, apathy, violence and powerlessness.”
L’Amante
Stoneware with Ceramic Glaze
45 x 60 x 44 inches | 114 x 152.4 x 111.8 cm.
Beth Cavener Stichter’s studio process is chronicled in an article in last month’s Sculpture Magazine; her work is also featured on the cover. Sculptures by the Artist are included in the public collections of the Smithsonian Institution of American Art (Washington, D.C.), the 21C Museum (Louisville, KY), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), among others. She has lectured extensively on her practice throughout the world. This is the Artist’s second solo exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery.
The opening reception for the artist is tonight from 6-8pm.
On View: September 13 to October 20, 2012
Stunning new oil paintings on canvas from the Artist are on view this weekend at Claire Oliver Gallery. September 5 – September 8, 2012
Museumsinsel Berlin
Oil on Canvas
59 x 78.74 x 1.5 inches | 150 x 200 x 3.8 cm.
Touch
Oil on Canvas
47.24 x 55.12 x 1.5 inches | 120 x 140 x 3.8 cm.
Table with Bottles, Fruit, and Snails
Glass, wood, paint, glue
48 x 26 x 20 inches | 121.9 x 66 x 50.8 cm
Claire Oliver Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Beth Lipman that are simultaneously photographic, documentary, and conceptual. Lipman is known for her three-dimensional, heavily laid tables, overflowing with symbols of contemporary society’s extravagance and materialism. Through a glass recreation of these symbolic objects, critically adopting a language pioneered in Baroque and Renaissance Vanitas still lifes, Lipman exploits the transparency and fragility of the medium. She comments on our consumer society riddled with covetousness and vulnerability, tempting our confidence but denying us the satisfaction of our physical longings. We are allowed to look through it but we cannot visually possess it. The Artist’s clever and truly unique process is one that must be seen in person to fully enjoy.
Shells, Urns, Basket of Fruit, Books
C-Print face-mounted to Plexiglas
34 x 57 x 1 inches | 86.4 x 144.8 x 2.5 cm.
The Artist creates her own narrative still lifes, making the objects by hand, carefully grouping them together, and photographing them. She then scales the two-dimensional result to the actual size of the three-dimensional objects and prints this image onto clear Plexiglas. What changes the expected dynamic in this process is the Artist’s final surrender: Lipman’s destruction of the physical sculpture. The effect is a series of conceptual shifts: what was once an object becomes a representation of that object; what was a representation of an object becomes a photographic image of that representation. The object rendered in glass replaces the object crafted in glass and the reference is destroyed. The finished works are transparent and unexpected, allowing light to pass directly through them and reducing the tangible yet further.
The opening reception for the artist is tonight from 6-8pm.
On View: July 12 – August 11, 2012
Andrew and Claire posing for the opening show of “Color Ignited: 1962-2012″. This would become his first museum acquired piece of art, and was taken right after he received the news!
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of The American Studio Glass Movement, The Toledo Museum of Art is presenting a major glass exhibition highlighting the role of color –from the conceptual to the metaphoric– in the art of those who choose glass as their medium.
We are proud to share that the works of Gallery Artists Andrew Erdos and Judith Schaechter have been included among a selection of nearly 100 objects from an international scope of public and private collections. Co-curated by Toldeo Museum curator of glass and decorative arts Jutta-Annette Page as well as director emeritus of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, Peter Morrin, Color Ignited: Glass 1962-2012 commemorates the first experimental glass workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art that transformed the status of glass into a popular and respected artistic medium.
ArtDaily gives a brief history of the workshops as follows:
Judith Schaechter
Stained Glass Lightbox
27 x 42 x 6 inches | 68.6 x 106.7 x 15.2 cm
“The Toledo Museum of Art director in 1962, Otto Wittmann, invited Harvey Littleton, a ceramics instructor and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, to present a workshop to explore hot-blown glassworking techniques outside the factory setting. Littleton, whose father was a scientist at Corning Glass, had been interested in exploring the artistic properties of glass as far back as 1947. During a 1957 trip to Italy he was intrigued by small glass furnaces operated by local glassblowers, and he subsequently led a panel discussion on the possibilities in glass as an artistic medium in 1959. He agreed to lead the first glass workshop in March 1962 in what was previously a garage on the TMA grounds. Toledo proved to be the perfect location as Wittmann’s support, combined with artist interest and the expertise available from the local glass industry, provided the institutional backing to jump-start the movement. The first attempts to construct and use a prototype “studio” pot furnace to melt glass batch (the raw materials that become molten glass when heated at elevated temperatures) failed until local glass technician Dominick Labino and glassblower Harvey Leafgreen arrived on the scene. The pair offered valuable advice that helped make the workshop a success. Labino, then vice-president and director of research at Johns-Manville Fiber Glass, helped with furnace construction and provided low-melting glass marbles that served as a workable batch. Leafgreen, a retired glassblower from Libbey Glass, demonstrated how to blow glass to the seven workshop participants. The first workshop turned out to be so encouraging that another was held in June 1962.”
The show opened on June 13th and runs through September 9th.
