Detail: Iraqi Ditch, 2005, oil on cast pigmented Hydrocal, fresco markings, 48 x 67 x 2"

 

Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz: Surface to Air
March 21 - May 6, 2008

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 22nd 4 -6 pm

For Immediate Release

 

Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of paintings Surface to Air by Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz. Spatz-Rabinowitz was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work exploring war and our tendency as humans to solve disputes through bloodshed and carnage. She continues in Surface to Air to express a sense of outrage and despair about the ubiquity of violence in this series of powerful paintings.

Using her own invented process of casting Hydrocal, with embedded pigment, charcoal markings, and old plaster patinas from previous pours to construct supports for her paintings, Spatz-Rabinowitz creates richly suggestive abstract surfaces. The rough cast abstract substrates are born partly of chance, accident, and surprise in the studio. Their irregularity and the aggressive physicality of the plaster work hand in hand with the delicately painted illusionistic passages to form a metaphor for our real and stricken world.

The imagery in the paintings is drawn from Spatz -Rabinowitz's vast collections of photo journalistic images. The selection process develops slowly as she searches for the right connection and synergy between image and plaster. Culling images from varied sources, Spatz-Rabinowitz intentionally forfeits total specificity and pointed political statements. As in Iraqi Ditch where images of blue slippers from Afghanistan and dolls from Auschwitz are combined in the same debris strewn landscape. The specifics of politics and geography are intentionally compressed in the paintings in order to more acutely express a sense of global catastrophe. Rather than emphasizing a particular conflict (though the Iraq war is never far from her mind), these paintings speak about what it feels like to live mutely in a world, albeit a decidedly mediated one, that brims with violence.

 

For further information please contact Alexis Dunfee at Howard Yezerski Gallery 617.262.0550 Tuesday - Saturday 10-5:30pm