FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

mac premo                                                      Robert Warner 

…..my systems are in your hands                Return to Angelica                                            

January 10 – February 9, 2008

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of collages and mixed-media constructions by New York artists ROBERT WARNER and MAC PREMO. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, January 10, from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through February 9.

The gallery is located at:533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues).

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

In his new series of collages and constructions, Return to Angelica, ROBERT WARNER combines vintage book covers, chandelier crystals, optical lenses and all manner of printed ephemera to give visual form to his memories of Angelica, the rural town in upstate New York where he, along with seven generations of his ancestors, was raised. These intimate works combine fragments from the artist’s familial past with images from mass culture, such as Sunday morning newspaper comics and popular nature studies, to evoke themes that are at once deeply personal and part of our collective memory. As curator and master printer of Bowne & Co., Stationers (South Street Seaport Museum) in New York City, the artist draws from an enormous archive of visual and typographical source material, which he often prints in unusually bright inks and on varied surfaces. Warner’s use of 19th century printing presses and materials from the distant past draw inspiration from the work of Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters but reflect a distinctly individual style. A close friend and colleague of the late Ray Johnson, he has had long-standing ties to the field of Correspondence Art, building upon its tradition of cultural/material exchange, double-entendre, and serial repetition. This is Robert Warner’s first solo exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

MAC PREMO’s current exhibition, my systems are in your hands, reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration into Systems Theory, that is, the interdependence of systems in nature, society and science. In the first two parts of an ongoing series aptly titled Understanding Everything, Premo looks to the innate human impulse to order and understand the world through the organization of systems. The myriad ways in which these distinct vocabularies interrelate, be they systems of physical (e.g. mathematics, science, etc.) or emotional data (e.g. memory, morality, etc.), is the primary subject of his meticulously crafted objects of wood, found objects and collage encased in poured resin. The first group is a series of hand-held constructions that explore the relationship between a seemingly unified whole and its constituent elements – the sum and its parts. This dialectic is in fact the essence of collage, an aesthetic of juxtaposition and formal/thematic simultaneity. Premo’s work also explores the cyclical nature of systems in works that reference not only the physical process of art making, but also the transport and presentation of art. The exhibition includes a short animated film work in which the artist’s distinct style is expressed in a dynamic sequence of collage-like imagery. Mac Premo has been exhibiting his work since 1999, most recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and PS1 MOMA in Queens. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

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