AMOS ENO GALLERY :: EXHIBITIONS

Recent Exhibitions:

CROP: New Work by Sunyoung Seo

November 23 — December 17, 2011
Artist Reception
Thursday, December 1st, 6-9 PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Sunyoung Seo that perform as abstract reflections of the artist’s emotions that delve into her unconscious thoughts. Her work employs playful imagery that incorporates typical materials, such as fabrics and stuffing found in toys, which speak in a universal way to both children and adults. She is inspired by children’s drawings, which show a psychological interpretation of environmental space. In a whimsical way, Seo’s paintings and installations explore her thoughts about the contradictory relationship between the material world and art culture.

Seo seeks to transform the material world into the visual through turning ordinary imagery into vibrant mutated forms. These forms reveal human emotions, such as religiosity, jealousy, mortality, desire that are integral to her life and culture around her. Her paintings and sculptures represent who she is as well as become symbols for who we all are as humans. Through provocative objects and compositions, expressed with vivid color, Seo intends to draw the viewer’s attention to meaningful relationship between seemingly disparate aspects of common human experiences, which reflect the diverse cultures and languages coexisting in New York City.

Seo received her MFA from C.W. Post Long Island University, attended the Fashion Institute of Technology for toy design, and earned her BFA in Korea. She has extensively exhibited in the United States and Korea. Universities and several private collections in United States and Korea own her works. In addition, She attained a VSC grant from the Vermont Studio Center and her installations have been exhibited in public parks and community centers.

MINI- RETROSPECTIVE Paintings by Walter Thompson

This show exhibits work executed over three decades. Thompson confesses it is an indulgence, motivated in part by his advanced age but also by a curiosity and desire to see in a gallery setting how the work hangs [or not] together. Beginning with his hard edged, geometric paintings of the 80s, he moves into the tangled and buried geometric frameworks of the following decade to the still geometric but deliberately bland lay out of the nine rectangles of the 00s. The earlier works he refers to as double lines. The work in the 90s he calls over/under and the more recent body of work he has named nine of them.

Finding ways to make paint and form spell out their own identities is his continuing goal. Thompson identifies himself most deeply with the New York school of painters of the fifties and sixties. The various endeavors of those painters to make pure form and color achieve expressive ends is an endlessly fascinating and exciting problem for him. He develops his own strategies for letting the materials of his art express their own nature, free of obligations to other levels of meaning.

Thompson has been a member of Amos Eno since 2000. This is his fifth exhibition with the gallery. He is a retired teacher of art and art history. He has published over ninety art reviews, articles and essays for various publications, mostly Art in America. He has also written a book on Paul Cézanne, a new edition which is due out in early 2012.

Mimi Oritsky: New Work

September 28 — October 22, 2011
Artist Reception Thursday, October 6th, 5:30-8:30 PM

Amos Eno gallery is pleased to announce New Work, an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by Mimi Oritsky. With New Work, Oritsky presents her abstracted landscapes inspired by her time on Cranberry Island, Maine. Oritsky’s new Resting and Dock Shadow series bring the vantage point back to 45 degree angles inspired by both dense forests and open waters surrounding her studio. In these drawings and paintings, Oritsky continues to translate brilliantly the airspace between the artist and where her eye rests. In this way, the viewer is invited to experience the intimate relationship and involvement with the environment that Oritsky herself experiences.

Mimi Oritsky ultimately seeks to “create a space structured by light and a surface marked by the rhythm of moving air.” This is achieved through a unique process in which she uses oil on canvas and gouache on paper. The paint is thick and layered, allowed to dry in between applications. Specific areas are then scraped away resulting in a kind of topographical texture on both the canvas and the paper. Bold brush strokes and markings imitate the life and movement inherent in the landscapes, blending representation with abstraction, stillness with motion, and isolation with unity.

Mimi Oritsky received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and her work is included in several private, museum and corporate collections. She has received recognition through Purchase Awards such as the Reading Public Museum and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts/Arcadia University, as well as Residence Fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Artists for Environment Foundation and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation.


	Current Exhibition: Hey Beautiful! Featuring: Vika Adutova, Jennie Booth, Annie Kyle, Midori Okuyama, Zoë Williams, Siang-Jen Yang February 1 – February 25, 2011 Artist Reception Thursday, February 2nd, 6-9 PM Beauty. There is perhaps no concept more closely associated with art in the popular imagination. But beauty has been having a rough time lately. Successive avant-garde movements and each corresponding “anti-art” gesture have deposed the belle of the ball. The art world did not drive out beauty directly; rather it got rid of her partner, the ugly. Decaying ruins became Romantic; banal fixtures became Culture; Film du Soleil made the burned out wasteland a magical counter-utopia. By aestheticizing and canonizing the Gothic, the Industrial, the Abject, and the Uncanny, the art world turned “ugly” into “interesting”. And where did that leave beauty? No longer the opposite of ugly, beauty became the opposite of relevant. Never one to dance alone, beauty sat on the sidelines. Someone once offered her a Sublime corsage; it lifted her spirit, but provided no gladness to the senses. This exhibition inquires into the role of beauty in art now. Can beauty retake the aspirational zenith of art? Or does it function as cultural décor and marketable commodity? Is art today merely designed or aesthetically purposive? These works play with, against, and for beauty, asking us to consider whether beauty can be reformed. Even celebrated. Is beauty back? - Richard Rinehart, Guest Curator
	Recent Exhibitions: CROP: New Work by Sunyoung Seo November 23 — December 17, 2011 Artist Reception Thursday, December 1st, 6-9 PM Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Sunyoung Seo that perform as abstract reflections of the artist’s emotions that delve into her unconscious thoughts. Her work employs playful imagery that incorporates typical materials, such as fabrics and stuffing found in toys, which speak in a universal way to both children and adults. She is inspired by children’s drawings, which show a psychological interpretation of environmental space. In a whimsical way, Seo’s paintings and installations explore her thoughts about the contradictory relationship between the material world and art culture. Seo seeks to transform the material world into the visual through turning ordinary imagery into vibrant mutated forms. These forms reveal human emotions, such as religiosity, jealousy, mortality, desire that are integral to her life and culture around her. Her paintings and sculptures represent who she is as well as become symbols for who we all are as humans. Through provocative objects and compositions, expressed with vivid color, Seo intends to draw the viewer’s attention to meaningful relationship between seemingly disparate aspects of common human experiences, which reflect the diverse cultures and languages coexisting in New York City. Seo received her MFA from C.W. Post Long Island University, attended the Fashion Institute of Technology for toy design, and earned her BFA in Korea. She has extensively exhibited in the United States and Korea. Universities and several private collections in United States and Korea own her works. In addition, She attained a VSC grant from the Vermont Studio Center and her installations have been exhibited in public parks and community centers. MINI- RETROSPECTIVE Paintings by Walter Thompson This show exhibits work executed over three decades. Thompson confesses it is an indulgence, motivated in part by his advanced age but also by a curiosity and desire to see in a gallery setting how the work hangs [or not] together. Beginning with his hard edged, geometric paintings of the 80s, he moves into the tangled and buried geometric frameworks of the following decade to the still geometric but deliberately bland lay out of the nine rectangles of the 00s. The earlier works he refers to as double lines. The work in the 90s he calls over/under and the more recent body of work he has named nine of them. Finding ways to make paint and form spell out their own identities is his continuing goal. Thompson identifies himself most deeply with the New York school of painters of the fifties and sixties. The various endeavors of those painters to make pure form and color achieve expressive ends is an endlessly fascinating and exciting problem for him. He develops his own strategies for letting the materials of his art express their own nature, free of obligations to other levels of meaning. Thompson has been a member of Amos Eno since 2000. This is his fifth exhibition with the gallery. He is a retired teacher of art and art history. He has published over ninety art reviews, articles and essays for various publications, mostly Art in America. He has also written a book on Paul Cézanne, a new edition which is due out in early 2012. Mimi Oritsky: New Work September 28 — October 22, 2011 Artist Reception Thursday, October 6th, 5:30-8:30 PM Amos Eno gallery is pleased to announce New Work, an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by Mimi Oritsky. With New Work, Oritsky presents her abstracted landscapes inspired by her time on Cranberry Island, Maine. Oritsky’s new Resting and Dock Shadow series bring the vantage point back to 45 degree angles inspired by both dense forests and open waters surrounding her studio. In these drawings and paintings, Oritsky continues to translate brilliantly the airspace between the artist and where her eye rests. In this way, the viewer is invited to experience the intimate relationship and involvement with the environment that Oritsky herself experiences. Mimi Oritsky ultimately seeks to “create a space structured by light and a surface marked by the rhythm of moving air.” This is achieved through a unique process in which she uses oil on canvas and gouache on paper. The paint is thick and layered, allowed to dry in between applications. Specific areas are then scraped away resulting in a kind of topographical texture on both the canvas and the paper. Bold brush strokes and markings imitate the life and movement inherent in the landscapes, blending representation with abstraction, stillness with motion, and isolation with unity. Mimi Oritsky received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and her work is included in several private, museum and corporate collections. She has received recognition through Purchase Awards such as the Reading Public Museum and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts/Arcadia University, as well as Residence Fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Artists for Environment Foundation and the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation.

Hey Beautiful!

CROP: New Work by Sunyoung Seo

MINI- RETROSPECTIVE Paintings by Walter Thompson

Mimi Oritsky: New Work