 Codex - Canaan, 2004 A Portfolio of Five Screenprints (3-12), Size: 24" x 24", 24" x 30", Paper: Arches 88g Stephen Westfall New Works on Paper Bruno Marina Gallery is pleased to present "New Works on Paper" by Stephen Westfall. The exhibit will include watercolors, monotypes and silk screens that expose one another's subtleties and draw the viewer to investigate the artist's reinvention of familiar elements. In a set of screen prints made at Durham Press, Westfall uses his known pictorial vocabulary - grids, windows, maps, flags and buildings - to create new forms and pictorial spaces that, as the artist states, derives "a formal language from landscape" while "finding landscape within a formal language." Architecture, energy and cultural complexity can be seen in the two towering jewel-like structures in "Canaan", the colorful chords dancing on a black backdrop in "Transfigured Night", or the vibrant compositional fabric of "Diamond Life". A series of monotypes made at the Aurobora Press is distinguished by the openness of its composition and the sense relaxed precision. The monotype process, which renders each print unique, is inherently unpredictable and requires a sense of experimentation. The mathematical exactitude of the artist's hand is tempered by the imprecision of the way in which the individually inked mylar templates lay down the blocks of color. The balanced asymmetry characteristic of Westfall's body of work is made increasingly potent within this process. In "Landmark", a low-lying structure that rises from the bottom of the page, an off-kilter stack of colored bands that pop from their irregular black outlines. In "Miracle Mile", color-saturated pennants stretch across the whiteness of the page, calling to mind the fanfare of a used car parking lot and beautifully articulating Westfall's distinctive stylistic synthesis of Pop, Minimalism and early 20th century purist painting. Similar to the monotypes, Westfall's watercolors strike an accord between the variable nature of the medium and the geometry of the composition. As the lines saturate the paper and become diffused, they blur the architectonic composition. The movement created by Westfall's astute color juxtapositions and off-kilter arrangements of form is further animated by the medium. Unlike oil paint, watercolor is stubborn and lines are not easily reworked. Rather than painting thick and opting for control, Westfall works with the unpredictability of the medium. The resultant layers of wash create subtle shifts within the structure of Westfall's compositions. Stephen Westfall's work has been shown extensively in solo exhibitions at galleries in the United States and Europe. As an art writer and critic, he has written for "Art in America" among other publications.He is currently the Painting Co-Chairperson of the MFA program at Bard College and the Class of 1932 Fellow in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. His work can be found public collections such as the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Munson Proctor-Williams Institute, Utica. He has an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in Schenectady, New York, Westfall currently resides in New York City. Exhibition: November 16, 2005 - January 18, 2006 Opening hours: Sat/Sun 12 - 6 pm (Mon-Fri by appointment) Bruno Marina Gallery 372 Atlantic Ave. USA-Brooklyn, NY 11217 Telephone + 1 718 254 0808 Email info@brunomarinagallery.com www.brunomarinagallery.com |
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