Gao Hang, “Shark 3.1″, acrylic and oil on canvas, 24″ x 24”
Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Sine Sole Sileo (without the sun I fall silent) at Anya Tish Gallery, Houston. Dates: On view now until September 19, 2020.
Featured artists: Adela Andea, HJ Bott, Paweł Dutkiewicz, Orna Feinstein, Gao Hang, Dmitri Koustov and Katja Loher
Via Anya Tish Gallery:
“Oscar Wilde’s saying, ‘Nature imitates art’ is a truism, for art is one of the ways through which human beings penetrate Nature. This exhibition, featuring a collection of works by the gallery artists, illustrates the immense influence Nature has on the inspiration of the artist, and enables the viewer to experience each artist’s unique aesthetic involvement with Nature. Among the exhibited works, Adela Andea’s glowing, biomorphic forms enable us to become aware of the fleeting beauty of Iceland’s Glacier Lagoon; Katja Loher’s videos of the plight of pollinators help us appreciate and marvel at Nature’s processes that preserve our earthly existence; and Paweł Dutkiewicz’s large-scale paintings, luminous and exquisitely delineated with floating spaces of color, reveal Nature’s inner principle of dynamic harmony.
“*From the Latin: Without the sun I fall silent.
“Romanian-born, Houston-based, Adela Andea, uses industrial electronics, LED lights, flex neon, plastics, and other mass-produced objects, to create futuristic ecosystems that ebb and flow between organic biological forms and glowing technological structures. Her inspirations are derived from science and nature – from the bioluminescence of underwater sea life, through the melting icebergs that plague the planet, to various cosmological and interstellar occurrences.
“Russian-born, Dmitri Koustov, is a professor of art at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. Koustov’s creative passion is inspired by his surrounding Texas environment, encouraging works filled with gestural patterns of captivating surfaces. This lyricism finds expression in abstract compositions where luminosity is derived from the interplay of light and the layering of hues. Through his unique technique, Koustov creates compositions riddled with movement and texture, orchestrating a symphony of intoxicating colors and textures that emphasize the distinctive character of Texas terrain, climate, and sunlight.
“Classically trained in photorealistic painting in his native China, Gao Hang’s recent paintings are a striking departure from his previous work. This Houston-based artist evokes the postmodernist neo-pop movement by using subject matter and color as a conceptual and structural armature. Deliberately, Hang uses florescent hues, which he considers to be the tones of his generation, conjuring quietly electric paintings of sharks, bears, and other predatory animals that transition into intimate portraits with a stable gaze that are distinctly more human than feral.
“Self-described baroque minimalist, Houston-based artist, HJ Bott, creates systemic works based on his DoV (Displacement of Volume) concept. Bott’s work in this show is his geometrically abstract painting, “Danxia”, inspired by the majesty of the Danxia peaks and mountains in China. Although geometrically abstract, his work has subliminal undertones that go beyond the surface, questioning humanity’s disregard for the drastically changing ecology of the earth. Spanning more than 6 decades, Bott’s oeuvre is the result of a brilliant mind coupled with the insatiable desire to create.
“Swiss-born multi-media artist, Katja Loher, creates works that construct a dialogue between themes of nature and technology by integrating futuristic style performance art and video into traditional forms of sculpture. Loher seamlessly fuses the technological with the organic addressing ecological urgencies, abuses of technology, and the future of humanity, while simultaneously drawing attention to the intrinsic beauty of the life sustaining processes that support our planet.
“Houston-based, Israeli- born artist, Orna Feinstein, is fascinated with nature’s inherent abstractions. Feinstein’s work displays the geometric complexities that exist within nature, creating a new reality where the organic and the geometric form a balanced and yet playful composition. The artist extends the boundaries of the traditional format of monoprint into the realm of sculpture and installation. Using unconventional materials such as concrete, laser cut paper, and plexiglas, Feinstein creates three-dimensional, kinetic works of art that manifest a Moiré effect.
“Polish painter, Paweł Dutkiewicz, considers his large-scale paintings to be in the realm of abstract realism ‘because they are related to the nature of man, to his inner rhythm and experiences.’ Dutkiewicz’s sublimated approach to painting results in an expansive, meditative body of work. Layers of beeswax and paint saturate each canvas to create ethereal nuances of tone. Vibrant planes of vermilion, cerulean and amber create a visual field that eclipses geometric flatness, inducing a luminous atmosphere that teeters on the edge of optical perception. The cascading chromatic spectrums and drifting tonalities seem both motionless and radiating, emitting a sense of glowing transparency and the rich, ophthalmic warmth of captured light.”
