aubrey levinthal: Image Makers at NOVELLA

Hey friends, I've got news -- I'm part of this totally killer show!

So come see! Show is at Novella Gallery on the Lower East Side 164 Orchard St. Opening is December 10th from 6-9pm and it continues through January 10th 2015 (whaaa? 2015? when did that happen?)

I'm really looking forward to seeing how all these painters' visions hang together but I have no apprehensions with curator/artists Avital Burg and Eleanor Ray at the helm. Here is the press release:

"Elena Sisto’s Seeing Sound shows the back of a small canvas placed at a jaunty angle in front of a woman’s face. The visible edges of her cheek and neck appear to be blushing, suggesting an intense, perhaps playful, engagement with the image on the canvas. The space between her face and the canvas is compressed, as if she might be pressing her nose against its surface. Many of the works in this show similarly project the viewer into an image, with assertive, frontal shapes, close cropping, or a shallow space. Sisto’s Seeing Sound also presents an apt image of the show’s central concern: the artists’ engagement with the image itself, often as the catalyst from which other painterly elements emanate.

In Image Makers, Novella Gallery presents the work of 11 artists, offering a range of approaches to image making: from day-lit clarity to enigmatic fragmentation, and from explicit autobiography to hinted narrative. Varied source materials and sometimes-autobiographical details are transported into fictive realms that remain open and generous in implication. Each artist’s work articulates a clear interest in the meeting of the image with the language of painting, whether as a distillation of the observed world, a questioning of preconceptions, or an ordering of personal history. As Susan Jane Walp wrote about the world of painted equivalents that Lennart Anderson opened to her as a student, “For lack of a better word (and one he might not approve of), it was an abstract world. Entering it was entering a realm of infinite possibility, and from the very beginning I loved dwelling in it.”"

Edit 1/4/15: Below are a few installation shots from NOVELLA's website, to see more, visit this link