FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Maritta Tapanainen   Morphology

Leslie Hirst   fourmation

March 20 – April 19, 2008

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new collages by MARITTA TAPANAINEN and mixed media paintings by LESLIE HIRST. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 20, from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through April 19.

The gallery is located at:533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues). Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

The meticulously composed collages of Finnish-born MARITTA TAPANAINEN transform intricate cut-outs from mechanical, scientific and botanical illustrations into new morphologies, or explorations into the organization of living systems and/or languages. In her most recent body of work, previously intimate environments have not only grown in scale, but in linear and spatial complexity. Evidences of the real are embedded in wildly organic arrangements that assume the qualities of automatic drawing, suspended against rhythmic backdrops of abstract planes. The accumulated fragments of pods, cells, tendrils and anatomical details coalesce to form a distinct sense of otherworldliness. Quirky and fragile, Tapanainen’s collages employ a somber palette of black, white and sepia tones. Critic Peter Frank observes that “the poetics of her works maintain not in what seems to happen but what seems to be”, and goes on to say, “What seems to be, especially in Tapanainen’s recent work, is a kind of near-animation, not so much suspended as diffused. These pictures are not of events but of conditions, still lifes rather than narratives, but still lifes invested with a visual energy that keeps them restless…Tapanainen finally comes off in these works not as collagist nor draughtswoman nor writer, but as a gardener, tending to fantastic, perhaps microscopic, indisputably vital eruptions of a whole new kind of flora.” Maritta Tapanainen has exhibited extensively in the United States since the early 1990s. This is her second solo exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

For her first solo exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, LESLIE HIRST presents seventeen “landscape paintings” in which four-leaf clovers are suspended between rich layers of paint and resin, alternately replicating the grid-like structures of urban environments and natural growth patterns. Anomalies themselves, the four-leaf clovers in her work are found during the artist’s regimented long-distance runs, an integral part of her process. Subtle, seductive and unexpected, the clover paintings reflect Hirst’s daily navigation of both natural and man-made worlds, investigating the unique substructures of each. They not only record her travels through these environments but also map their systems of order, whether mathematical, scientific or fantastical. Arthur C. Danto observes that “each work is the product of a personal encounter with nature, at a given time, under given circumstances, but transformed into something ‘rich and strange’, to use Shakespeare’s words, so that the personal has become obliterated in the final radiance, like a holy sign.” These mixed-media works project elements of time directed by her observation of human interaction to and within varying layers of existence.  Leslie Hirst currently lives and works in Providence, RI and is a professor of art at the Rhode Island School of Design.  

For additional information and images please contact Maggie Seidel at (212) 675 7490 or [email protected]