FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

JAMES ZVER                                                        May 27 – June 25, 2005

Near Sunset – L.A.

D.E. MAY

template - grid - insert

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of two solo exhibitions by west-coast artists JAMES ZVER and D.E. MAY. Near Sunset – L.A. features a selection of collages and wood reliefs by California artist JAMES ZVER and spans the period 1998 – 2004. template – grid – inset features new works by Oregon-based artist D.E. MAY. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, May 26, from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through June 25.

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

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

JAMES ZVER: Near Sunset – L.A. Artist James Zver transforms delicately colored papers, cut or torn from safety envelopes, and geometric pieces of cut wood into intimate and evocative abstractions. Often working in series, he draws inspiration from a variety of sources. After relocating to Los Angeles in the early 1990’s, he found he was affected by the energy and inspiration of that distinctive environment.

The collages from the 1998-1999 Mood Enhancer Series evolved out of earlier sculptural work, often serving as studies, and marked a shift away from more formalist concerns toward poetic allusion and the evocation of emotive states. Subsequent series, such as the Summer Collages (2002-2003) and the Dordogne Series (2003-2004) continue this exploration. In the Summer Collages a high energy use of color resounds, while in the Dordogne Series Zver refines his use of pattern and color with the introduction of new materials such as vintage wallpapers.

Of his earlier wood reliefs, the Closer and Closer Apart Series, the artist writes, “These rectangular pieces (referring to his collage works) were primarily involved with painterly concerns, mood and subtle surface color transitions. I wanted these concerns to carry over to the reliefs, combining them with the physicality and dimensionality of wood.” In these works, cut wooden fragments are stained, often repeatedly, and assembled into abstract accumulations that are both painterly and architectonic. In the subsequent Semi-Detached Series, Zver reinvestigates his process, choosing cracked, fragmented, and irregular pieces of wood, marred by time and history and marrying them into diverse configurations. This series, comprising of six works in which individual forms are paired, takes on a metaphorical interconnectedness.

James Zver has exhibited throughout the United States since the 1960’s. His work is in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, IBM Corporation, New York, Oakland Museum of Art, California, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island and numerous other public and private collections. He is featured in The Collage Handbook by John & Joan Digby (Thames & Hudson, New York, 1985). This is James Zver’s first exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

D.E. MAY - template – grid – inset. D. E. May operates visually within a code of color and subdivision. Also working in series, May creates untitled compositions that map out an unknown world – sparse and foreign, yet strangely familiar. Author Joel Weinstein writes: "D.E. May’s fictitious cartographies, obscurely annotated diagrams and temple-like box works seem to come to us across a vast, musty expanse of time. They are like unexpected arrivals, like postcards lost for decades in the mail whose appearance makes us believe, for one magical instant, that the Post Office is some grand, mysterious vortex and not merely an amazingly inept bureaucracy."

In his templates, as pure an essence as the artist achieves, we see monochromatic color fields, reductive as the simple tools used to trace them – triangle, ruler, French curve. Nonetheless, they manage to provoke a tangible ache, as if they are not so much works mounted on the wall, but rather attacks of longing, sudden remembrances. May’s work relies on a balance of geometric precision and understatement. The architectural climate of his drawings recalls the display schemes of (one of the father’s of industrial design) Raymond Loewy. However, his artifacts are far removed from the cold calculated mechanical persistent, they are hand made and handheld, laced with a touching intimacy.

D.E. May’s sculptural works – with the aid of paper, cardboard, wooden scraps, oil and graphite, are reminiscent of architectural models, ancient ruins, and cityscapes. In the grids, his deadpan linear reproduction of low-tech graph paper, the sort favored by high-school math teachers, creates a foundation for elements of history to be collaged upon. Here he plots arcane systems with affection for the ravages of time, embracing stains and abrasions as though these were the true foundations of formalist rigor. Seeing the world through the small aperture of May’s mappings, the viewer discovers a place where the bland earnestness of instruction manuals meets the complicated poetry of the actual world. May elaborates on his process to say: “I am concerned with time and temperature and tars and resins and climates. And Regions. Stains. The color of glue. Random marks of a traveled space. The role of water. Then, there are times I look down at the worktable, and I would just like to remove history”.

D. E. May's art is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, Oregon, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Boise Art Museum and numerous private collections. In 2003 he had a retrospective exhibition at Maryhurst University in Oregon. His work was featured at the Portland Art Museum in the 2001 Oregon Biennial and in the George Suyama Space in Seattle. This is his first solo exhibition in New York and at Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

For additional information and images please contact Julie Brunner Cross at (212) 675- 7490 or [email protected]