FUNG WAH   
January 6 - February 6, 2007
Opening Reception SATURDAY: JAN. 13th 5- 7pm

For Imediate Release

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present Fung Wah, a group exhibition featuring former residents of Boston now living in New York. Named for the well-known China Town Bus linking the two cities, this show offers a reconnection with a group of artists that worked, studied, and taught in Boston during the late 1990's. Most of the artists met while at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and others have been more recently introduced through this network friends and colleagues. Fung Wah was organized by artist Ridley Howard, who received his MFA from the Museum School in 1999.

The work in this exhibition includes painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and photography. The themes present are as varied as the media used, but there is some common interest in a personal and contemporary idea of image. This ranges from Kristin Baker's abstract vision of spectacular destruction and Diana Puntar's bejeweled minimalist satellite to Nuno De Campos' carefully articulated illusionistic miniature. Justin Lieberman's work offers a subversive dream of contemporary American image culture, and Karolyn Hatton borrows from a similar bank to create offbeat mis-en-scene narratives. Laurel Nakadate deliberately complicates the psychology of desire in viewer and subject through a staged sex-kitten persona; and Claudine Anrather indulges in a painterly swirl of rococo(ish) sensuality. Kurt Kauper presents an imagined portrait of hockey great Bobby Orr as a heroic and idealized masculine icon. His subtle classical rendering recalls the language of Ingres and Michelangelo, while Holly Coulis' oddball character portrait blends a grunginess and grace more like the early 20th century paintings of Picabia and Kisling. Torben Giehler combines the visual structure of computer-generated reality with a more romantic notion of landscape and space. Similar painting traditions take a different form in Ana Maria Velasco's colorful daydream of personal experience, fluid space, and romanticized memory. Eric Doeringer plays with appropriation, art stardom, and consumption in his bootlegs of popular contemporary artists, while Cheyney Thompson's computer generated drawing of a single line combines playful criticality and a minimalist sensibility. Ridley Howard creates a fictional world immersed in the language of painting and cinema. Similarly, painting is offered as an alternate experience in both Kanishka Raja's surrealism-tinged cultural melt and Charlotta Westergren's floating coral, which presents a candied reality akin to Dutch still life.

All of the artists in this show have exhibited nationally and internationally since their time in Boston. Fung Wah will run from January 6 through February 6.

 

 

 

For further information please contact Alexis Dunfee at Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm