Repetition
Artists
Press Release
Cos Cob, CT, September 2013--The Drawing Room Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of their Fall Exhibition, “ Repetition”, which runs September 21- November 12, 2013. This four-person show examines the captivating processes and concepts of repetition and pattern and includes painting, metal sculpture and mixed media works by Heidi Lewis Coleman, Alec Madoff, Gowri Savoor and Marie Suri.
There will be a reception with the artists on Saturday, September 21, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.
This unique exhibition features the work of four regional artists, who despite stylistic and conceptual differences, all share a fascination with color, surface design, and the structure derived from repetitive shapes and color. Each artist employs various techniques of pattern and repetition as a formal device in their work while utilizing a variety of materials, from welded bronze and steel to watercolor on paper.
Heidi Lewis Coleman’s work reflects her ongoing exploration in the aesthetics of employing language in the visual arts. Coleman, a Stamford artist, is very much inspired by Asian art and calligraphy. Her mixed media pieces incorporate the use of photographs of her own painting and writing, which are then printed onto handmade Japanese papers, and finally mounted onto canvas and painted again. Her mixed media works often include mandalas ,which suggest a spirituality and energy that translated into her own universal, abstract language.
Greenwich artist (and Museum of Natural History’s Senior Principal Preparator), Alec Madoff, creates assemblages and sculptures that are directly inspired by his life-long love affair with collecting, which include pottery shards, shells, pods, bones, and small tools and relics from the distant past. Each work is meticulously organized, simulating carefully composed grids and concentric circles, while suggesting the curious illusion that these objects are suspended and weightless in space. The combination of such details elevates the preciousness and nostalgia of each object used, suggesting a sacredness and inherent value in items that have been discarded or forgotten from the past.
Marie Suri’s contemporary, handcrafted wall hangings and furniture celebrate the material of metals and the seductive nuances and textures discovered from steel, copper, brass and bronze. Torching metals in her Darien studio, Suri combines jewelry making techniques with metalsmithing, creating unique modern designs, while often incorporating recycled materials such as daisy-chain mesh and steel motor components. The result captures an interesting tension between such stalwart, industrial materials manipulated into elegant orchestrations.
Gowri Savoor’s vibrant watercolor paintings reflect her ongoing interest in capturing fleeting and ephemeral moments in time. Using photography as her initial process to record the perception of sunspots, water droplets and ice crystals, she gathers mental imagery of transient shadows, light and movement. From these referential sources she paints colorful depictions of the perception of light, manifested through webs and hoops of radiating color. These visual journeys through space and time become introspective investigations into the human body, the cosmos and the self.
