ART VITAM GALLERY
3452 NORTH MIAMI AVENUE – MIAMI, FLORIDA 33127 (WYNWOOD ART DISTRICT)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COLLAGE SERIES
6 January - 26 February 2005
Mathilde DENIS, Christian DURAN, Matthew ROSE & Christina STAHR
OPENING: SATURDAY JANUARY 8, FROM 7 PM – MIDNIGHT.
Coincides with the Second Saturday Walk Through Wynwood Art District.
VIP Breakfast Friday 7 January, 9 am – noon, in conjunction with ART MIAMI.
MIAMI--Collage is both subject and object in Art Vitam’s first exhibition of 2005, featuring four artists --Mathilde Denis Christian Duran, Matthew Roseand Christina Stahr -- who have long used the technique invented by Picasso and Braque to expand upon contemporary aesthetic issues.
“Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary,” writes art historian Dian Waldman for the Guggenheim Museum. “It is a medium of materiality, a record of our civilization, a document of the timely and the transitory.”
Since the early 20th century when George Braques purchased a roll of oak-grain wallpaper and began cutting and pasting them to his paintings, through the iconoclast Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, the Dadaists, Surrealists and right through Robert Rauchenberg’s “combine” paintings and Ray Johnson’s pre- and post-Pop works, collage has been the medium and technique of choice to best describe, analyze and portray the fragmented nature of contemporary consciousness.
MATHILDE DENIS plumbs a distinct, sensual collage sensibility with her series of painted, abstract works. The artist, who lives and works in Paris, brings together a modernist spirit inspired in part by supremistist master Kasimir Malevich with a 21st century temperament that is, in a word, sumptuous. Using cut board, fabric, found objects, paper, words and scumbled, painted surfaces Denis’s canvases are wild, sometimes savage musical suites that float upon ochre and beige-toned grounds. She has shown her large format works throughout France and Europe.
For Denis the act of composition is magical and emotional: materials are often rescued from other worlds (the street, bookshelf, the wastepaper basket) and then applied energetically onto canvas, covered up with paint, stripped down, and recovered, a process she likens to unpeeling the layers of her “self.” The works are a kind of performance where, Denis says, she “loses the balance and finds it again…to strive not to see it…to endanger myself…to lay myself bare.”
Christian Duran, a Miami native, mines the information age, bringing anatomical and nerological issues to the everyday surfaces of our obesssive consumer culture. “For this series at Art Vitam, I am collaging anatomical figures and ink drawings onto printed surfaces-- books and newspapers,” he says. “The curious play between these figures and the rich text spaces they inhabit, hearken to a more fundamental state of human nature: one deeply seeded, and humbled, in the natural world.”
Duran’s poetics probe both the skin of the mind and the structure beneath it to reveal the connective tissue between death and being in the 21st century. His vision is a marriage of mysticism and realism, evoking a powerful and often visceral response to the realm of the human psyche.
Matthew Rose reinvigorates surrealism in his series, A Perfect Friend, combining vintage and popular images of the 1920s and 1930s, and children’s science drawings from the 1950s, to produce a contemporary tales that are both Pop and poignant. In these limited-edition prints, Rose, an American artist and writer who lives in Paris, takes a left turn on the surrealism of Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, and Hans Bellmer. Sex and identity are typically mixed in startling ways: A snarling English setter’s head is perfectly placed upon the elegant torso of a 17th century Dutch portrait. Cat’s eyes beam out from an singer’s head, a startled hostess balances a head of plates on her neck, a swan reads a libretto while at the opera..
“The prints are reminiscent of surrealist great Hans Bellmer's fragmented dolls series, the photography of Claude Cahun, the leggy dancing girl collage by Georges Hugnet,” wrote Omaha Pulp editor and art critic, Leslie Prisbell, when these works were first shown at Gallery 73 in Omaha, Nebraska in 2003. “Rose is a surrealist in every sense of the word, including the presence of unbridled desire in his work. Sure, a woman's arm might be attached to a lobster claw, but the composition is well -- sexy as hell.”
Matthew Rose’s collages and prints are collected throughout the US and Europe. His text works, PAINTINGS, are permanently installed in The Boca Raton Museum of Art
Christina Stahr takes subtle route in her collage works and mixed-media collages on paper, fabric and canvas are minimalist gems. The New York-based artist fashions new “books” from older ones she’s recuperated, often covering the surfaces with gold leaf and multiple layerings of paint, drawing and paper. Stahr rewrites history in what could be called “luxury editions.” Her “chocolate” collages, produced from chocolate candy wrappers (she says she’s eaten the contents herself), rise to a majesterial elegance, the works covered in gold leaf, glittering in their compact compositions.
Stahr’s “Breast Collages” are perhaps the most dramatic and political of all her works. The wrinkled parched paper "skins" allude to the processes of aging and to the depletion and depression that so often result from being sucked dry,” she says. The impetus for the series comes from Stahr’s observation that breast feeding in our male dominated society is still looked down upon – “it’s still taboo” – in spite of the fact that the Virgin and Child is one of the most revered images in Western society.
Art Vitam is pleased to invite all to a VIP breakfast, Friday 7 January, from 9 – Noon, in conjunction with ART MIAMI. Collectors will have the opportunity to preview these exceptional collage works, and meet with the artists.
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For more information or high resulution images of the artists’ work, please contact Sophie-Anne Blachet at info@artvitam.com or 305 571 8342
ART VITAM GALLERY
3452 North Miami Avenue – Miami, FL 33127 (WYNWOOD ART DISTRICT)
T: 305-571-8342
E: info@artvitam.com
W: www.artvitam.com