FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

RHONDA ZWILLINGER   Black Swan    

October 11 – November 10, 2007

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce Black Swan, an exhibition of new mixed media sculptures by RHONDA ZWILLINGER. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, October 11, from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through November 10.

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

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

After a long absence from the New York art world, RHONDA ZWILLINGER returns with a solo exhibition of new mixed media sculptures that reflect radical changes in both her art and life. At the height of an international career that began in the East Village art scene of the 1980s and culminated in museum exhibitions across Europe and Japan, Zwillinger became part of a small and profoundly marginalized population of people suffering from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), more commonly referred to as Environmental Sickness. Her extreme vulnerability to everyday chemical substances landed her in a “safe house” in the northern Arizona desert where she embarked on a long and difficult process of physical healing and artistic reinvention. During this time she produced The Dispossessed, a photo-documentary book and exhibition that gave voice to the chemically injured.

Zwillinger’s earlier work was an exploration of popular culture that combined painted icons of our media culture with baroque excess in the form of objects richly encrusted with glass jewels, beads and embellishments. Her sculptures and installations from the 1980s and early 1990s were often viewed in the context of kitsch when in fact they contained a more complex discourse of class and gender. By contrast, Zwillinger’s new work is an exploration of the self and reflects a distinctly organic aesthetic. The encrusted objects of her past (high-heeled shoes, furniture, candelabras) have been replaced with assemblages of found objects whose surfaces have been marked by time and the elements. These serve as armatures for similarly opulent albeit abstract accumulations of crocheted steel wire, glass beads, pearls, precious and semi-precious stones and Swarovski crystals. The exhibition title references epistemologist and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s characterization of a black swan as “anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.” In the same way that Taleb questions our tendency to confuse improbability with impossibility, Zwillinger’s studio practice over the last decade has been a forced reevaluation and restructuring her life and process.

Rhonda Zwillinger has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1983. Exhibitions include Gracie Mansion Gallery; Wessel O'Connor Gallery; Holly Solomon Gallery; Groninger Museum, The Netherlands; Cartier Foundation, Paris; P.S. 1, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Delaware Museum of Art; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Bass Museum, Miami, FL. This is her first solo exhibition with Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

Black Swan is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essay by curator and critic Carlo McCormick. For additional information and images please contact Maggie Seidel at (212) 675 7490 or maggie@pavelzoubok.com