Summer Group Show
Shawn Snow, David Konigsberg, Joseph Maresca, sculpture by Monica Mechling
July 7, 2010 through August 9, 2010
David Konigsberg is a conceptual realist. For this exhibit he offers two distinct views: very large paintings noting the small details of daily life, and small paintings of the big dramatic HudsonValley farming landscape. In the still life painting “Ebenezer Whites”, a bunch of harvested white onions on a platter, a kitchen knife and a patterned tablecloth are seen from the cook’s viewpoint, a familiar little moment in the kitchen. The opposite play of unexpected scale occurs in “Across Route 9”, a small landscape depicting a very low horizon line with furrowed fields, and a big sky of fluffy, hovering clouds. The finishing glaze gives these oil paintings on panel a wash of light and depth. This is David Konigsberg’s fourth exhibit at the gallery. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Ghent, NY and will be donating a percentage of his proceeds to the Columbia Land Conservancy.
Joseph Maresca returns to the gallery after his recent exhibit of exquisitely detailed film scene interiors. Like Konigsberg, he easily transitions between very small and very large canvases, by reversing the scale and painting large, almost Fauvist, landscapes. He paints these new works with bold, diagonal slashes of color and refers to the process as “the idea of sewing, of weaving colors together”. The paintings are a textured, prismatic latticework that leads the eye into the wetlands and forests, the view lines along the Hudson River. The large scale painting “Sunshower” weaves light and vivid colors in a way that feels saturated and brilliant, like a summer day after the rain.
Joseph Maresca has had a long career in the both the decorative and fine arts and lives in Rhinecliff, NY with a view of the Hudson River from his studio.
With her love of classical sculpture, Monica Mechling creates an elegant feminine world out of clay. For this new series of gunmetal grey figures with wrapped torsos and “false faces”, the medium is a type of resin clay that sculpts beautifully. Mechling states, “The clay guides me as much as I guide the clay”. The “Kabuki-like” serene heads have been blackened with graphite which is suspended in an acrylic medium, painted on, fired, and then burnished. Mechling’s figures are disarmingly beautiful and struggle to free themselves from society’s expectations. Monica Mechling lives and works in Hudson, NY.
Shawn Snow creates controlled meditative fields of color by painstakingly layering transparent glazes until a chromatic resonance is achieved. Deceivingly simple at first glance, the paintings reveal muted complexities within their layers. They are an exploration of dualities; light and dark; accumulation and reduction; chaos and control; always working toward a balance of states. Snow writes, “I strive for purity in my paintings; harnessing light to provoke a primal, emotive response." Shawn Snow has exhibited with Carrie Haddad for fifteen years and lives in Troy, NY.
