Gallery Ü ARTcade::Press
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10/12/05
coolcleveland.com
by Lee Batdorff
batdorffATadva.com
Playing with the Light Within @ Gallery Ü thru 10/14 Karen Maria van de Vliet, who is currently on a three-month sabbatical in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood away from her home in Rotterdam Holland, is a very playful artist. She explores the transition between “play” and “awe.” Through masterful use of color and shape she plays with composition and light producing shimmering portraits of people she knows, including her Cleveland friends. This is her first U.S. exhibition. The closing reception for this show, which includes an apparel installation by Alexis Marie Savon, with assistance by R Ferris, both of the Cleveland area, will be Friday October 14 from 5 to 10 p.m. at Gallery Ü in the Colonial Marketplace ARTcade, 530 Euclid Ave., Suite 30.
The fifteen brilliant acrylic paintings on the long gallery wall are portraits of Clevelanders. These are mostly of Ms. van de Vliet’s new American friends she met since July 31 when she arrived in Cleveland. Portraits projected onto Savon’s hanging apparel installation are of van de Vliet’s friends in Holland. Some of each projected portrait falls on the apparel hanging in mid-air and other parts of the image lands on the wall behind it. This exhibit looks different depending on whether a viewer sees the projected portrait from the left or right of the installation.
“(Ferris) was part of developing the concept behind the installation focusing on turning the two dimensional into 3D, while inviting the viewer to walk through and take part in the installation. His own work was not shown at this show,” said van de Vliet.
“I like playing around with the intimacy of friendships,” she said. Her style resembles hyper-expressive experimental comics that are simultaneously realistic and extreme. “Color is emotion,” she said.
She works from photographs of her subjects drawing her impression on canvas (not by tracing the photograph) followed by “dreaming” the rest in acrylic paint. She captures the subject’s likeness while the portraits are many forms in one. Lines, stars, circles and squares glow through realistic facial features. While they may appear to some viewers as projected onto the portrait’s face, this, according to van de Vliet, is “the glowing light within.”
Many of her subjects are actually people that she is close to. She has known some of these people for some time. And producing a portrait from a sitting model is passé. Instead she produces a portrait after having seen the subject in real life situations over a period of time. She sometimes sees how a person maintains their emotional balance before producing a portrait.
Before traveling to Cleveland she didn’t paint for six months. “I fell in love with a guy, and spent my time with him.” She arrived in the U.S. on July 31 and started hanging out with several people who became her subjects. She started her first Cleveland painting on Aug. 11. This was of her boyfriend back in Holland, Wietse, painted from a photo of him sent to her. Another early painting of this series was of the quizzical face of a dog who is having fleas picked from its back. “What’s going on in that face?” asked van de Vliet.
She works on two or three paintings simultaneously and completed all 15 portraits, and one collaborative piece, in about a month. (Half the speed of Vincent Van Gogh, another Dutch favorite said to produce one painting a day.) The 16th piece, “Jam Session,” is a “spontaneous undertaking” between van de Vliet and South Euclid muralist, illustrator and painter John Howitt. “We had a lot of fun communicating with one another without words but through art, a lot like what musicians do when developing songs while having a jam session,” van de Vliet said. Some of van de Vliet’s commercial illustrations are used as cell phone screen savers.
When seeing van de Vliet’s paintings it is easy to recollect the “Psychological Expressionism” show by Cleveland area artist Sid Rheuban at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery earlier this year. Mr. Rheuban’s wildly bright portraits are bold and distorted like the early 20th Century French fauvist painters.
This is very different from the otherworldly refined style of van de Vliet. While their styles are vastly different both artists provide characters that glow from within. Rheuban paints in oil and acrylic and some of his work is painted on one side of Plexiglas providing an image that can be seen from two sides, “allowing two different emotional perspectives,” according to that show’s release.
“I like it here,” said van de Vliet. “There is a kindness about people here. People are more open. In Holland people are more closed than here. Here people talk to each other everywhere. It is easy working here. It is relaxed.”
Karen van de Vliet’s Web sites is http://www.karenvandevliet.nl. Gallery Ü can be reached at 216-323-0085 and http://www.galleryucleveland.com.
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9/14/05
FreeTimes
Light of the Netherlands : Karen Maria Van de Vliet: High Art from the Low Countries
By Lyz Bly
SINCE ARRIVING in Cleveland from Rotterdam at the end of July, artist Karen van de Vliet has been prodigiously productive, creating 16 portraits, which currently adorn the walls of Gallery Ü. The resulting exhibition, Playing with the Light Within, also includes an apparel installation by Alexis Marie Savon, and a video piece by R Ferris.
Van de Vliet's portraits embody the title of the exhibition, as her subjects' energy is exuded through her ability to charge their expressions — especially their eyes — with an electrifying intensity; this is underscored by van de Vliet's use of vibrant colors, geometric shapes, and angular lines. There is an edgy nervousness about the work, which makes it visually and emotionally compelling.
Van de Vliet paints with acrylic, but her technique defies the glossy artificiality that so often accompanies that painting medium. The artist sparingly applies the paint on unprimed canvas, which, in her words, “sucks the paint into the raw material.” The surfaces are activated with intense hues, which are countered by the occasional suggestive detail, like the subtle curve of a waft of hair, or a quickly but expertly sketched heel of a boot, or foot of a stool. The paintings are stylish, often evoking the American graphic art and design of the 1970s. This is most evident in the paintings of people from magazines. Smoke, for instance, depicts a thin, purple-faced individual with a nest of tangled, multicolored hair taking a drag of a tobacco or marijuana cigarette. The person's face and hand are a mix of purple, green and blue, giving them an otherworldly quality. The surface of the canvas is packed with colors, shapes, and agitated lines; even the smoke that emanates from the cigarette appears controlled and linear in black and white.
The “light within” is most evident in the portraits van de Vliet paints of her friends and loved ones. Despite the stylized quality inherent in the vivid colors and angular shapes and lines, the artist is able to capture the spirit of the people she paints. Ed and Tracy are paintings of the friends she is staying with in Cleveland — Ed and Tracy van der Kuil, who work part-time at Gallery Ü. In Tracy the artist captures the subject's thoughtful sense of intelligent reserve, as uncontrolled wisps of hair contrast her subject's pensive, introspective expression. Van de Vliet also perfectly portrays Ed's personality, as his eyes, nose, mouth, and cheeks fill the picture. His eyes are lively, and he offers viewers a crooked, devious smile. Unlike Tracy, whose eyes pensively avoid the viewers' gaze, Ed looks directly at the viewer, unabashedly confronting them. His expression is playful yet composed; the mischievous side of his personality is underscored by a wild array of quickly rendered lines and dots in vivid teal blue, red, white and yellow. Van de Vliet manages to make Ed's green eyes sparkle right off the canvas. These paintings reveal the artist's genuine affection for and understanding of her portrait subjects/friends.
Jam Session represents a collaboration between van der Vliet and Cleveland artist/musician John Howitt. The painting references Cleveland on the left, and Rotterdam on the right. While the urban energy of both cities is apparent through cartoon-like, graffiti-esque imagery, the Cleveland side is, of course, much grimier. Yet the fluorescent orange and bright blue meld remnants of each city's skyline, perhaps representing the partnerships the van der Kuils plan to establish between Cleveland and Rotterdam artists.
“We hope that [Karen's show] is the start of a long-term project where we can bring Dutch artists to Cleveland and send Americans from Cleveland to the Netherlands,” Ed van der Kuil explains. Hopefully, with the van der Kuils' energy and Gallery Ü's owner/director Patsy Kline's support, the exchange can continue. Cleveland needs to export more of its cultural products and endeavors, and if this exhibit is an indication of the kind of work that will be introduced from Rotterdam, the importation of culture is also sure to be inspiring.
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6/13/05
epitome magazine
The Business of Being A Woman
Passion for Art: Patsy Kline's Gallery Ü
by Terry Sternin
epitomemag.com
The development of a non-commercial art gallery is a difficult and costly task. The few galleries in Cleveland that historically promoted innovative art, such as Howard Wise Gallery in the mid-'50s, Nina Sandell Gallery in the late '60s-early '70s, and Ross Widen, who had a run of nearly 30 years, all had a tough time. Howard Wise relocated to New York and became a premier gallery. Nina Sandell eventually closed her Gallery and also returned to New York. Ross Widen Gallery gradually became an art supply/gift store/frame shop just to stay in business.
Patsy Kline, owner and director of Gallery Ü Cleveland, is a throwback to the aforementioned art dealers: a Peggy Guggenheim with a kinder disposition but without the endowment. Kline wants to revitalize excitement in this segment of the Cleveland art scene by exhibiting works by the vanguard of current local artists and nationally recognized, established artists who have strong ties to Cleveland. Her dedication to this pursuit is born out of a love for art and recognition of a need to preserve, promote and advance the greater Cleveland communities' current art history.
Gallery Ü is a grass-roots undertaking situated in the growing gallery community of the Colonial Marketplace ARTcade in downtown Cleveland. The ARTcade's purpose is to support the development of a downtown gallery district by providing a welcoming venue where contemporary art can be viewed and collected. Kline's vision for Gallery Ü is to present art that generates growth, narrates the emotional expressions of the unconscious, fosters change and encourages creativity.
Asked how art impacts everyday life, Kline explained, "Art is a huge part of our daily lives. Most of us aren't aware of it as we are inclined to think that art is something we analyze in galleries, museums, or on the lounge walls of the rich and famous. We are misinformed, however, with such a simple view. Art is much more than home décor for the affluent. Art is all around us, over us, under us, through us. Art is an inextricable part of our lives. It is in our best interest to identify and understand art and its many forms. Once we appreciate the images we are faced with and understand their meanings, the more we are able to grasp the profound effects of art on our lives."
Kline's passion for art and her innovative approach to running a gallery have inspired several close friends to collaborate to expand and enhance the gallery and its offerings. Ed and Tracy van der Kuil help bring in new artists and performers to the space, Shelly Gracon assists with media relations, promotions and events (see related article on Shelly), and local artist Michael McNamara assists with installing works in the gallery. McNamara will also exhibit his paintings at the gallery in October
This collaboration resulted in the first exhibition/fundraiser, ReThinkPink, held at Gallery Ü last February. The goal of the event was to raise awareness of the importance of breast self-exams through self-painted breast prints created by local women (and men). It was a remarkable success. Kline looks forward to the support and energy that fueled this effort to expand her unique vision for the gallery and the ARTcade space as a whole.
The third Friday of each month the ARTcade features ARTwalk from 5-9 p.m. in which all the galleries participate.
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5/20/05
coolcleveland.com
Luminosity/Luminous Show @ Gallery Ü
by Lee Batdorff
Seeing differently from the every day visuals is the goal of New York City painter and Swedish immigrant Anders Knutsson in his Luminosity/Luminous show at Gallery Ü through early June. Some might call his use of phosphorus pigment paints and costumes a gimmick. I call it "better than the 1960s," which I also witnessed.
Gallery Ü (prounounced "oou") in the ArtCarde at 530 Euclid Avenue between Euclid and Prospect Ave. has black knockout cloth over two thirds of the Gallery's arcade windows. Through windows of the remaining gallery space, the gallery "annex," one can see from the arcade hall alluring paintings of trees, plus a kitsch-seeming image of the Verrazano Narrows suspension bridge between Brooklyn where Knutsson lives, and Staten Island.
Pity the poor daytime passersby in the arcade without the opportunity to see how these paintings can transform at dusk. During the April 15th evening opening the gallery operator had the arcade lights turned down and small groups of viewers in the annex gallery space saw something they've never seen before. This is Knutsson's phosphorus (which glows-in-the-dark after being exposed to light) painted reenactment of a sunset sky over a lit up Verrazano Narrows bridge.
In regular lighting, the crowd gathered facing the painting. When the gallery lights went off, my eyes felt a small sensation while adjusting to the glow. For about 30 seconds the folks focused on the painting of the bridge uttered "OOU!" and "AH!" This sunset faded in less than a minute. So fast you can see it dissipate. Kitch?
Even without the glow, in normal light, the nearby paintings of large trees seem to harbor life beyond what is easily reproduced on canvas, like these were images of large mammals lounging about.
The most colorful luminescent show however, is in the blacked out main portion of Gallery Ü. In normal light the paintings are very colorful. When the lights go out, your eyes experience a "shift." Among the new set of colorful images that appear are of people dancing wildly. The shift to seeing the glowing paintings is a subtle roller coaster for the eyes. While dimming all the time the luminosity of these paintings lasts for several hours.
During the opening, Lynn Deering, Director of the Cleveland State University Dance Program and Joe Booth of the Dance/Theatre Collective, disrobed from Kimonos revealing glow-in-the-dark tights. The dancers moved to music performed by Han Eddy van der Kuil on drums, formally of industrial band DINK, Craig Pearsall on keyboard and song by Shelly Gracon, both of industrial band DOT. Or did the dancers flow? While one could determine male from female by their glowing designs, during the 20-minute dance the two dancers seemed like human shaped glowing amebas that flowed in and out of the surrounding glowing paintings. After the show, I felt revved up, as if I rode my bicycle back and forth over the Detroit-Superior Bridge a couple times.
Knutsson, 67, immigrated to the U.S. in 1967 and is a U.S. citizen. He's studied light for many years. "A lot of interesting things go on with the retinal system at low light levels," he said. "You have only indirect vision. You experience a body system that you don't normally encounter. It is like seeing stars at night. Sometimes you'll only see a star out of the corner of your eye and can't see it when you try to look at it."
Clevelanders are taken by light shows. The first large display of outdoor electric "arc" light in the world was held by electrical inventor Charles F. Brush to the amazement of thousands in Public Square on the evening of April 29, 1879. These days, the tops of downtown skyscrapers are lit as well as a number of bridges across the Cuyahoga River. Cleveland was fortunate enough to have a "Lasarium" in the old Allen Theater in Playhouse Square during the 1970s as well as the December 2003 show Luminocity: Art and Technology Igniting Cleveland, which lit the exterior of the Cleveland Trust Building and Rotunda at Euclid Avenue and East 9th Street.
Light is a natural for Clevelanders. If you like light in the dark, make sure to see the Luminosity/Luminous show at at Artcade ARTwalk on Fri 5/20 between 12-9PM. See it at Gallery Ü this Friday and Saturday from 12-4PM. Show will close the first or second Friday in June depending on a performance schedule.
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4/7/05
FreeTimes
Nature vs. Nurture
Organic and Man-made Forms at Gallery Ü
by Lyz Bly
AMID THE TRANSIENT GALLERIES that make up the Colonial ARTcade is Gallery Ü. Owned by Patsy Kline, the gallery, which is actually two distinct spaces within the urban, mall-like building, is a reliable venue for top-notch art by regional and national artists.
Gallery Ü's current exhibition, Germination: Reformation, Debra DeGregorio & Kevin Shahan, features 11 of DeGregorio's abstract, lucidly rendered drawings of intriguing organic forms in one gallery, and eight frenetically painted, Pop Art-inspired works by Shahan in the other.
The curatorial concept is quite compelling, as DeGregorio's work is about creating fantastical forms that are at times plantlike, at times evocative of human forms. Shahan appropriates and reconfigures signs and text — the visual language of everyday life — in his paintings. The play between constructing (or creating) and deconstructing (or taking apart and reconfiguring) forms and signs is clever, yet it would have been more interesting to see DeGregorio and Shahan's work together, intermingled throughout the Gallery Ü spaces. Such interplay could have served as commentary on the reproduction and deconstruction not only of signs, but also of the intangible, sacrosanct realm of abstraction, which is allegedly more “pure,” as it represents the side of humanity that is primal and spiritual. Integrating the artists' works might have also addressed the way the visual language of popular culture permeates the American psyche.
Despite this limiting curatorial scheme, Germination: Reformation does present large bodies of DeGregorio and Shahan's works, which are visually gripping in their own right. DeGregorio's drawings are simple and resplendent. Done largely in black on white paper, they subtly and sparingly incorporate matted colors such as cool light blue, hot red and muted peachy pink. The artist frequently calls the forms “bulbs” or “pods,” terms that reference plant life, yet the shapes are frequently reminiscent of human body parts. Pink & Blue Bulb, for instance, depicts a blue phallic form, complete with pink “testicles.” But the form is rendered fantastic as tendrils, like those of a sea creature, extend from the round, pink shape. The shapes are accentuated by gracefully drawn pencil lines, which continue beyond them; the lines are deliberate, yet rendered with abandon. While DeGregorio's drawings convey an expressionistic otherworldliness, their anthropomorphic, organic qualities imbue them with a comforting familiarity.
From a distance, Shahan's paintings appear as veritable orgies of images, text and symbols. In a culture filled with floating signs, Shahan's works attempt to congeal free-floating, contemporary iconography. Appropriating images from many facets of consumer culture, including magazines, postcards, billboards, advertisements and graffiti, he re-contextualizes fragmented words and images, as well as lines and colors. The paintings are the 21st century's version of Pop Art.
Time of Her Life , created in August 2001, presciently depicts a passenger plane pointing downward, with birds flying contentedly around it. On the right, the word “non-returnable” is printed in blocked letters that are scratched into, revealing the colors beneath. Shahan says the painting reminds him of the pre-9/11 world, when “things were more idyllic.” Shahan's paintings depict American excess; not only a glut of images, but an overabundance of objects and mundane ideas tied to consumption. Things were perhaps idyllic to some, but certainly not on a global or national scale. Shahan's paintings illustrate the oblivion Americans were living in before 9/11; they also reveal the oblivion many people still inhabit.
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3/11/05
coolcleveland.com
ReThink Pink @ Gallery Ü
by Lee Batdorff
Neither boring or pornographic, and very colorful and healthy, ReThinkPink, a show of prints at Gallery Ü in downtown Cleveland's ArtCade 530 Euclid Ave. was a joyful hit this year. It will return next year according to gallery owner Patsy Kline. Many of the images in this show, which closed on March 11, were composed by placing or swooshing paint-wetted breasts on paper by about 100 breast bearers, including three men.
"We wanted to do a collaboration which lead to community art which lead to different causes, which lead me to the concept of doing (breast) exams with paint on your hands and creating art with a purpose," said Ms. Kline. "This is art that all women would be able to create and display with pride. Art that could be all colors — the colors that best represented the participant's personal story. My aunt died of breast cancer and this is a homage to her lovely memory."
The show was conceived after Kline and four associates decided they wanted to have a show to raise funds for a local cause. After some research they selected the northeast Ohio affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Inc. who agreed to participate.
A visitor walking into the gallery immediately encountered a set of breast prints on one sheet titled, "The Girls." Kline said: "We want to encourage all women, especially young women who may not consider their risks or who feel fearful of doing a breast self-exam, to become familiar with what their breasts normally look and feel like with the help of colorful, self-painted body prints."
A refreshing interlude it is to encounter what non-commercial, non-sexualized, natural breasts look like with multiple colors and layers of paint. Said the show's news release: "Make a statement, don't be pink, be every color, and give breast cancer the boot. Create art for your own sake and the sake of all women and men."
Kline pointed out several of the pieces and told stories about them. One image had a vibrant blue circle on one side and a breast print on the other. My first time around the gallery I wondered about this piece. Ms. Kline explained that this artist had a mastectomy of one of her breasts.
As with many women, breast size was an issue for another of the contributors when she was young. When she grew older, she was still self-conscious about her breast size. Then she had breast cancer and a mastectomy. It was then that she realized size dosen't matter at all. There are more important things in life.
Several groups got together to make their prints. Four women collaborated printing themselves all on one large piece of paper. And "ten girls who work at Phoenix Coffee all got together at someone's home and had a party. They set up a paint station in a bedroom where each of them could do their prints in privacy, while the rest dined on hors d'oeuvres and drank wine in the adjoining room," said Kline. "They came to me with their prints and told about their party. I said, 'What? You had a party (to make such personal prints)!' I never thought about having a party to do this!"
At first they were going to limit entries to people 18 years old and up. Then a mother approached who wanted to include her 16-year-old daughter. Eventually several mothers teamed up to produce prints with their daughters. "Quite a few children where at the opening," said Kline.
The majority of people who submitted a print were affected by breast cancer in one way or another, either knowing someone that has had the disease or had it themselves. Some of the prints showed exactly where they found a lump in their breast. "They wanted people know where to look for lumps," she said. "And men can also get breast cancer too," someone said.
Tracy van der Kuil, Gallery Ü's assistant director was asked, "Doesn't the word 'pink' in 'ReThink Pink' limit you to only pink breasts?" Ms. Van der Kuil responded, "remember the word 'rethink' is in front of 'pink.' What does that do?" Then someone nearby answered, "Open it up to more than pink."
The closing featured a showing of "Breast Crack," a video installation by Bernadette Gillota and Annetta Marion, directors of the Ohio Independent Film Festival.
"As far as I know this (a show like ReThink Pink) has not been done by any other gallery or organization anywhere," said Kline. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of prints, which were sold in a silent auction and still being tallied, are being given to the foundation. She aims to stage ReThink Pink shows in New York City, Chicago and Rotterdam Netherlands next year.
The gallery has built alliances with national and international galleries and artists such as the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts in St. Bonaventure New York; the Cleveland State University Art Gallery; the Lazzaro-Signature Gallery of Fine Art in Stoughton Wisconsin; and Robert Carroll in Rome Italy. They are also developing an international artist exchange program scheduled to start this autumn.
Along with Patsy Kline and Tracy Van der Kuil the gallery staff and ReThink Pink organizing committee included Shelly Gracon, media relations assistant; Ed van der Kuil, gallery assistant; Mike McNamara, exhibit installer; and Sarah Marino, gallery attendant.
"Germination:Reformation," apparently another thinking and feeling show, featuring the paintings of Debra DeGregoria and Kevin Shahan, is coming to Gallery Ü on March 18 6-9 p.m. The opening features live musical performances by Tokyo Shapiro at 6 p.m. and dot.(ARTpop) at 8 p.m.
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10/20/04
Northern Ohio Live
Honorable Mention: 2004 Awards of Achievement
Leave it to a mulit-gallery exhibition titled The Buddha Project: Visual Manifestations of Buddhist Thought in the Western World to contemplate so complex a question: How is the transfer of Buddhist ideas from Eastern to Western cultures expressed in contemporary visual art? Using works that represented Buddhism both as tradition and abstract idea, The Buddha Project, (curated by CSU’s Jeanne Grossetti and Robert Thurmer) featured paintings, photographs, works on paper, sculpture and new media to explore different aspects of the religion. Co-curators involved in the exhibit were Cleveland State’s Center for Sacred Landmarks, Arts Collinwood, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Shambhala Meditation Group, Cleveland Zazen Group, ColdWater Zendo, Gallery Ü Cleveland, Insight Meditation of Cleveland, Jewel Heart Cleveland, Jijuyu-ji Zen Group of Cleveland, Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Thrive: An Artspace and West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.
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05/23/03
The Plain Dealer
ART MATTERS
Abstract Artists Make Most of Ideal ARTcade setting
by Dan Tranberg
Some art galleries are like white cubes. The relatively new Gallery Ü , part of the ARTcade in downtown Cleveland's Colonial Marketplace, is like a glass box.
As with all of the shops inside the arcade, the wide and unusually shallow gallery space has a completely transparent facade, making it look like one big display window. Its clean lines and stark, uncluttered design make it a perfect setting for contemporary art.
This month's exceptionally attractive exhibition at Gallery U features works by Richard Lazzaro and Edward Shalala, two out-of-town artists with direct ties to Cleveland.
Lazzaro is an emeritus professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-owner of an art gallery in Stoughton, Wis. He's also a 1959 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. His works, collectively titled "The Taiwan Series," loosely play off of the general idea of Chinese calligraphy, though they don't look the slightest bit Asian. With their colorful, free-form calligraphic lines, they more closely resemble funky American fabric designs from the 1950s.
Lazzaro is clearly well-versed in the subtleties of form and color. Every one of his paintings on paper is characterized by a precarious balance of bold shapes and delicate lines, all swimming around in undulating waves of color. In some, his playful lines accumulate into dense thickets that practically vibrate from the intensity of their shifting hues.
While Lazzaro's orientation appears to come directly out of Abstract Expressionism, the work of Shalala is more closely aligned with current trends in abstract painting. His handsome group of small, heavily textured canvases, titled "Syntheses: Color and Texture," places great emphasis on the physical, organic properties of paint.
A Cleveland native who moved to New York in 1978, Shalala seems to build his paintings like relief sculptures. He gradually accumulates a mixture of paint and burlap, which eventually takes on the look of heavy weathering. Adding a certain dynamic tension is the objectlike quality of Shalala's canvases, most of which are a foot or so tall and less than a foot wide. They are little constructions as much as they are paintings, which is interesting considering painting's long history of flatness.
Distinguishing them from the abstract paintings of decades past is their extreme focus on the materiality of paint, which brings into question the nature of paint as an object in and of itself. In a sense, they are like paintings of paint.
Gallery curator Patsy Kline, a designer who graduated in 1990 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, deserves accolades for assembling such a thoughtfully focused show.
Hopefully, it's just one of many to come.
The ARTcade is at 530 Euclid Ave., Cleveland; the exhibit is up through May 31. Call 216-323-0085.
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5/1/03
angle magazine
a journal of arts + culture
Richard Lazzaro and Ed Shalala @ Gallery Ü
By Douglas Max Utter
The aesthetic implications of marking and layering have been among the principal expressive considerations of painters and printmakers during the past half-century. Ed Shalala and Richard Lazzaro are two Cleveland-born artists who have enjoyed a degree of national and international exposure over the past four decades exploring these critical issues.
Shalala’s double suite of small paintings face each other from the end walls of Patsy Kline’s Gallery Ü. Lumpy and colorful, each is a phase of self-examination that alternately delves into and covers over the psychological hints that it discovers. These process-oriented, essentially surrealist works emphasize the psychic dimensions of a painted surface, and the rich associations evoked by complex textures. Obsessive almost to an extreme, Shalala’s oil, burlap, and string-on-canvas compositions often include as many as forty layers of paint on surfaces measuring between 8” x 12” to 16” x 20.”
Two Blues and Yellow is typically enigmatic. Its uneven accumulation of paint over burlap patches suggests forms in the way an abstract sculpture might. Raised, smoothed bas-relief-like encrustations of deep blue alternate with shallow ravines where sparks and rivulets of luminous yellow are visible, suggesting light and energy. Meanwhile, the regular pattern of the burlap weave contributes areas of more orderly terrain to a vision that seems like a relief map or heat-sensitive, infra-red study of repression and the intricate flow of psychic energy.
Richard Lazzaro’s Taiwan paintings are visually pleasing gouache-on-paper studies of human intimacy, moving blithely from the abstract qualities of interlocking lines to an overlying, more deliberately figurative, macrocosmic dimension. The emotional content of Lazzaro’s work is more overt than Shalala’s, but while a painting like his 25” x 35” Kiss strives for a degree of equivalence between paint and intricate webs of human feeling, it also conveys a sense of humor and contains a sort of art-historical, visual essay. The three ovate forms in Kiss intersect, describing an overlapping of bodies and lives. Only the central “head” has a profile. On the right an orange, maze-like spiral is emblematic of pregnancy. The cool greens and blues of the central couple complement each other, while around them hot yellow lines create a densely passionate conversation. At the same time, another sort of conversation is visible: Mark Tobey chats with Brice Marden, while Philip Guston shares his thoughts with Jean DuBuffet.
10/12/05
coolcleveland.com
by Lee Batdorff
batdorffATadva.com
Playing with the Light Within @ Gallery Ü thru 10/14 Karen Maria van de Vliet, who is currently on a three-month sabbatical in Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood away from her home in Rotterdam Holland, is a very playful artist. She explores the transition between “play” and “awe.” Through masterful use of color and shape she plays with composition and light producing shimmering portraits of people she knows, including her Cleveland friends. This is her first U.S. exhibition. The closing reception for this show, which includes an apparel installation by Alexis Marie Savon, with assistance by R Ferris, both of the Cleveland area, will be Friday October 14 from 5 to 10 p.m. at Gallery Ü in the Colonial Marketplace ARTcade, 530 Euclid Ave., Suite 30.
The fifteen brilliant acrylic paintings on the long gallery wall are portraits of Clevelanders. These are mostly of Ms. van de Vliet’s new American friends she met since July 31 when she arrived in Cleveland. Portraits projected onto Savon’s hanging apparel installation are of van de Vliet’s friends in Holland. Some of each projected portrait falls on the apparel hanging in mid-air and other parts of the image lands on the wall behind it. This exhibit looks different depending on whether a viewer sees the projected portrait from the left or right of the installation.
“(Ferris) was part of developing the concept behind the installation focusing on turning the two dimensional into 3D, while inviting the viewer to walk through and take part in the installation. His own work was not shown at this show,” said van de Vliet.
“I like playing around with the intimacy of friendships,” she said. Her style resembles hyper-expressive experimental comics that are simultaneously realistic and extreme. “Color is emotion,” she said.
She works from photographs of her subjects drawing her impression on canvas (not by tracing the photograph) followed by “dreaming” the rest in acrylic paint. She captures the subject’s likeness while the portraits are many forms in one. Lines, stars, circles and squares glow through realistic facial features. While they may appear to some viewers as projected onto the portrait’s face, this, according to van de Vliet, is “the glowing light within.”
Many of her subjects are actually people that she is close to. She has known some of these people for some time. And producing a portrait from a sitting model is passé. Instead she produces a portrait after having seen the subject in real life situations over a period of time. She sometimes sees how a person maintains their emotional balance before producing a portrait.
Before traveling to Cleveland she didn’t paint for six months. “I fell in love with a guy, and spent my time with him.” She arrived in the U.S. on July 31 and started hanging out with several people who became her subjects. She started her first Cleveland painting on Aug. 11. This was of her boyfriend back in Holland, Wietse, painted from a photo of him sent to her. Another early painting of this series was of the quizzical face of a dog who is having fleas picked from its back. “What’s going on in that face?” asked van de Vliet.
She works on two or three paintings simultaneously and completed all 15 portraits, and one collaborative piece, in about a month. (Half the speed of Vincent Van Gogh, another Dutch favorite said to produce one painting a day.) The 16th piece, “Jam Session,” is a “spontaneous undertaking” between van de Vliet and South Euclid muralist, illustrator and painter John Howitt. “We had a lot of fun communicating with one another without words but through art, a lot like what musicians do when developing songs while having a jam session,” van de Vliet said. Some of van de Vliet’s commercial illustrations are used as cell phone screen savers.
When seeing van de Vliet’s paintings it is easy to recollect the “Psychological Expressionism” show by Cleveland area artist Sid Rheuban at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery earlier this year. Mr. Rheuban’s wildly bright portraits are bold and distorted like the early 20th Century French fauvist painters.
This is very different from the otherworldly refined style of van de Vliet. While their styles are vastly different both artists provide characters that glow from within. Rheuban paints in oil and acrylic and some of his work is painted on one side of Plexiglas providing an image that can be seen from two sides, “allowing two different emotional perspectives,” according to that show’s release.
“I like it here,” said van de Vliet. “There is a kindness about people here. People are more open. In Holland people are more closed than here. Here people talk to each other everywhere. It is easy working here. It is relaxed.”
Karen van de Vliet’s Web sites is http://www.karenvandevliet.nl. Gallery Ü can be reached at 216-323-0085 and http://www.galleryucleveland.com.
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9/14/05
FreeTimes
Light of the Netherlands : Karen Maria Van de Vliet: High Art from the Low Countries
By Lyz Bly
SINCE ARRIVING in Cleveland from Rotterdam at the end of July, artist Karen van de Vliet has been prodigiously productive, creating 16 portraits, which currently adorn the walls of Gallery Ü. The resulting exhibition, Playing with the Light Within, also includes an apparel installation by Alexis Marie Savon, and a video piece by R Ferris.
Van de Vliet's portraits embody the title of the exhibition, as her subjects' energy is exuded through her ability to charge their expressions — especially their eyes — with an electrifying intensity; this is underscored by van de Vliet's use of vibrant colors, geometric shapes, and angular lines. There is an edgy nervousness about the work, which makes it visually and emotionally compelling.
Van de Vliet paints with acrylic, but her technique defies the glossy artificiality that so often accompanies that painting medium. The artist sparingly applies the paint on unprimed canvas, which, in her words, “sucks the paint into the raw material.” The surfaces are activated with intense hues, which are countered by the occasional suggestive detail, like the subtle curve of a waft of hair, or a quickly but expertly sketched heel of a boot, or foot of a stool. The paintings are stylish, often evoking the American graphic art and design of the 1970s. This is most evident in the paintings of people from magazines. Smoke, for instance, depicts a thin, purple-faced individual with a nest of tangled, multicolored hair taking a drag of a tobacco or marijuana cigarette. The person's face and hand are a mix of purple, green and blue, giving them an otherworldly quality. The surface of the canvas is packed with colors, shapes, and agitated lines; even the smoke that emanates from the cigarette appears controlled and linear in black and white.
The “light within” is most evident in the portraits van de Vliet paints of her friends and loved ones. Despite the stylized quality inherent in the vivid colors and angular shapes and lines, the artist is able to capture the spirit of the people she paints. Ed and Tracy are paintings of the friends she is staying with in Cleveland — Ed and Tracy van der Kuil, who work part-time at Gallery Ü. In Tracy the artist captures the subject's thoughtful sense of intelligent reserve, as uncontrolled wisps of hair contrast her subject's pensive, introspective expression. Van de Vliet also perfectly portrays Ed's personality, as his eyes, nose, mouth, and cheeks fill the picture. His eyes are lively, and he offers viewers a crooked, devious smile. Unlike Tracy, whose eyes pensively avoid the viewers' gaze, Ed looks directly at the viewer, unabashedly confronting them. His expression is playful yet composed; the mischievous side of his personality is underscored by a wild array of quickly rendered lines and dots in vivid teal blue, red, white and yellow. Van de Vliet manages to make Ed's green eyes sparkle right off the canvas. These paintings reveal the artist's genuine affection for and understanding of her portrait subjects/friends.
Jam Session represents a collaboration between van der Vliet and Cleveland artist/musician John Howitt. The painting references Cleveland on the left, and Rotterdam on the right. While the urban energy of both cities is apparent through cartoon-like, graffiti-esque imagery, the Cleveland side is, of course, much grimier. Yet the fluorescent orange and bright blue meld remnants of each city's skyline, perhaps representing the partnerships the van der Kuils plan to establish between Cleveland and Rotterdam artists.
“We hope that [Karen's show] is the start of a long-term project where we can bring Dutch artists to Cleveland and send Americans from Cleveland to the Netherlands,” Ed van der Kuil explains. Hopefully, with the van der Kuils' energy and Gallery Ü's owner/director Patsy Kline's support, the exchange can continue. Cleveland needs to export more of its cultural products and endeavors, and if this exhibit is an indication of the kind of work that will be introduced from Rotterdam, the importation of culture is also sure to be inspiring.
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6/13/05
epitome magazine
The Business of Being A Woman
Passion for Art: Patsy Kline's Gallery Ü
by Terry Sternin
epitomemag.com
The development of a non-commercial art gallery is a difficult and costly task. The few galleries in Cleveland that historically promoted innovative art, such as Howard Wise Gallery in the mid-'50s, Nina Sandell Gallery in the late '60s-early '70s, and Ross Widen, who had a run of nearly 30 years, all had a tough time. Howard Wise relocated to New York and became a premier gallery. Nina Sandell eventually closed her Gallery and also returned to New York. Ross Widen Gallery gradually became an art supply/gift store/frame shop just to stay in business.
Patsy Kline, owner and director of Gallery Ü Cleveland, is a throwback to the aforementioned art dealers: a Peggy Guggenheim with a kinder disposition but without the endowment. Kline wants to revitalize excitement in this segment of the Cleveland art scene by exhibiting works by the vanguard of current local artists and nationally recognized, established artists who have strong ties to Cleveland. Her dedication to this pursuit is born out of a love for art and recognition of a need to preserve, promote and advance the greater Cleveland communities' current art history.
Gallery Ü is a grass-roots undertaking situated in the growing gallery community of the Colonial Marketplace ARTcade in downtown Cleveland. The ARTcade's purpose is to support the development of a downtown gallery district by providing a welcoming venue where contemporary art can be viewed and collected. Kline's vision for Gallery Ü is to present art that generates growth, narrates the emotional expressions of the unconscious, fosters change and encourages creativity.
Asked how art impacts everyday life, Kline explained, "Art is a huge part of our daily lives. Most of us aren't aware of it as we are inclined to think that art is something we analyze in galleries, museums, or on the lounge walls of the rich and famous. We are misinformed, however, with such a simple view. Art is much more than home décor for the affluent. Art is all around us, over us, under us, through us. Art is an inextricable part of our lives. It is in our best interest to identify and understand art and its many forms. Once we appreciate the images we are faced with and understand their meanings, the more we are able to grasp the profound effects of art on our lives."
Kline's passion for art and her innovative approach to running a gallery have inspired several close friends to collaborate to expand and enhance the gallery and its offerings. Ed and Tracy van der Kuil help bring in new artists and performers to the space, Shelly Gracon assists with media relations, promotions and events (see related article on Shelly), and local artist Michael McNamara assists with installing works in the gallery. McNamara will also exhibit his paintings at the gallery in October
This collaboration resulted in the first exhibition/fundraiser, ReThinkPink, held at Gallery Ü last February. The goal of the event was to raise awareness of the importance of breast self-exams through self-painted breast prints created by local women (and men). It was a remarkable success. Kline looks forward to the support and energy that fueled this effort to expand her unique vision for the gallery and the ARTcade space as a whole.
The third Friday of each month the ARTcade features ARTwalk from 5-9 p.m. in which all the galleries participate.
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5/20/05
coolcleveland.com
Luminosity/Luminous Show @ Gallery Ü
by Lee Batdorff
Seeing differently from the every day visuals is the goal of New York City painter and Swedish immigrant Anders Knutsson in his Luminosity/Luminous show at Gallery Ü through early June. Some might call his use of phosphorus pigment paints and costumes a gimmick. I call it "better than the 1960s," which I also witnessed.
Gallery Ü (prounounced "oou") in the ArtCarde at 530 Euclid Avenue between Euclid and Prospect Ave. has black knockout cloth over two thirds of the Gallery's arcade windows. Through windows of the remaining gallery space, the gallery "annex," one can see from the arcade hall alluring paintings of trees, plus a kitsch-seeming image of the Verrazano Narrows suspension bridge between Brooklyn where Knutsson lives, and Staten Island.
Pity the poor daytime passersby in the arcade without the opportunity to see how these paintings can transform at dusk. During the April 15th evening opening the gallery operator had the arcade lights turned down and small groups of viewers in the annex gallery space saw something they've never seen before. This is Knutsson's phosphorus (which glows-in-the-dark after being exposed to light) painted reenactment of a sunset sky over a lit up Verrazano Narrows bridge.
In regular lighting, the crowd gathered facing the painting. When the gallery lights went off, my eyes felt a small sensation while adjusting to the glow. For about 30 seconds the folks focused on the painting of the bridge uttered "OOU!" and "AH!" This sunset faded in less than a minute. So fast you can see it dissipate. Kitch?
Even without the glow, in normal light, the nearby paintings of large trees seem to harbor life beyond what is easily reproduced on canvas, like these were images of large mammals lounging about.
The most colorful luminescent show however, is in the blacked out main portion of Gallery Ü. In normal light the paintings are very colorful. When the lights go out, your eyes experience a "shift." Among the new set of colorful images that appear are of people dancing wildly. The shift to seeing the glowing paintings is a subtle roller coaster for the eyes. While dimming all the time the luminosity of these paintings lasts for several hours.
During the opening, Lynn Deering, Director of the Cleveland State University Dance Program and Joe Booth of the Dance/Theatre Collective, disrobed from Kimonos revealing glow-in-the-dark tights. The dancers moved to music performed by Han Eddy van der Kuil on drums, formally of industrial band DINK, Craig Pearsall on keyboard and song by Shelly Gracon, both of industrial band DOT. Or did the dancers flow? While one could determine male from female by their glowing designs, during the 20-minute dance the two dancers seemed like human shaped glowing amebas that flowed in and out of the surrounding glowing paintings. After the show, I felt revved up, as if I rode my bicycle back and forth over the Detroit-Superior Bridge a couple times.
Knutsson, 67, immigrated to the U.S. in 1967 and is a U.S. citizen. He's studied light for many years. "A lot of interesting things go on with the retinal system at low light levels," he said. "You have only indirect vision. You experience a body system that you don't normally encounter. It is like seeing stars at night. Sometimes you'll only see a star out of the corner of your eye and can't see it when you try to look at it."
Clevelanders are taken by light shows. The first large display of outdoor electric "arc" light in the world was held by electrical inventor Charles F. Brush to the amazement of thousands in Public Square on the evening of April 29, 1879. These days, the tops of downtown skyscrapers are lit as well as a number of bridges across the Cuyahoga River. Cleveland was fortunate enough to have a "Lasarium" in the old Allen Theater in Playhouse Square during the 1970s as well as the December 2003 show Luminocity: Art and Technology Igniting Cleveland, which lit the exterior of the Cleveland Trust Building and Rotunda at Euclid Avenue and East 9th Street.
Light is a natural for Clevelanders. If you like light in the dark, make sure to see the Luminosity/Luminous show at at Artcade ARTwalk on Fri 5/20 between 12-9PM. See it at Gallery Ü this Friday and Saturday from 12-4PM. Show will close the first or second Friday in June depending on a performance schedule.
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4/7/05
FreeTimes
Nature vs. Nurture
Organic and Man-made Forms at Gallery Ü
by Lyz Bly
AMID THE TRANSIENT GALLERIES that make up the Colonial ARTcade is Gallery Ü. Owned by Patsy Kline, the gallery, which is actually two distinct spaces within the urban, mall-like building, is a reliable venue for top-notch art by regional and national artists.
Gallery Ü's current exhibition, Germination: Reformation, Debra DeGregorio & Kevin Shahan, features 11 of DeGregorio's abstract, lucidly rendered drawings of intriguing organic forms in one gallery, and eight frenetically painted, Pop Art-inspired works by Shahan in the other.
The curatorial concept is quite compelling, as DeGregorio's work is about creating fantastical forms that are at times plantlike, at times evocative of human forms. Shahan appropriates and reconfigures signs and text — the visual language of everyday life — in his paintings. The play between constructing (or creating) and deconstructing (or taking apart and reconfiguring) forms and signs is clever, yet it would have been more interesting to see DeGregorio and Shahan's work together, intermingled throughout the Gallery Ü spaces. Such interplay could have served as commentary on the reproduction and deconstruction not only of signs, but also of the intangible, sacrosanct realm of abstraction, which is allegedly more “pure,” as it represents the side of humanity that is primal and spiritual. Integrating the artists' works might have also addressed the way the visual language of popular culture permeates the American psyche.
Despite this limiting curatorial scheme, Germination: Reformation does present large bodies of DeGregorio and Shahan's works, which are visually gripping in their own right. DeGregorio's drawings are simple and resplendent. Done largely in black on white paper, they subtly and sparingly incorporate matted colors such as cool light blue, hot red and muted peachy pink. The artist frequently calls the forms “bulbs” or “pods,” terms that reference plant life, yet the shapes are frequently reminiscent of human body parts. Pink & Blue Bulb, for instance, depicts a blue phallic form, complete with pink “testicles.” But the form is rendered fantastic as tendrils, like those of a sea creature, extend from the round, pink shape. The shapes are accentuated by gracefully drawn pencil lines, which continue beyond them; the lines are deliberate, yet rendered with abandon. While DeGregorio's drawings convey an expressionistic otherworldliness, their anthropomorphic, organic qualities imbue them with a comforting familiarity.
From a distance, Shahan's paintings appear as veritable orgies of images, text and symbols. In a culture filled with floating signs, Shahan's works attempt to congeal free-floating, contemporary iconography. Appropriating images from many facets of consumer culture, including magazines, postcards, billboards, advertisements and graffiti, he re-contextualizes fragmented words and images, as well as lines and colors. The paintings are the 21st century's version of Pop Art.
Time of Her Life , created in August 2001, presciently depicts a passenger plane pointing downward, with birds flying contentedly around it. On the right, the word “non-returnable” is printed in blocked letters that are scratched into, revealing the colors beneath. Shahan says the painting reminds him of the pre-9/11 world, when “things were more idyllic.” Shahan's paintings depict American excess; not only a glut of images, but an overabundance of objects and mundane ideas tied to consumption. Things were perhaps idyllic to some, but certainly not on a global or national scale. Shahan's paintings illustrate the oblivion Americans were living in before 9/11; they also reveal the oblivion many people still inhabit.
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3/11/05
coolcleveland.com
ReThink Pink @ Gallery Ü
by Lee Batdorff
Neither boring or pornographic, and very colorful and healthy, ReThinkPink, a show of prints at Gallery Ü in downtown Cleveland's ArtCade 530 Euclid Ave. was a joyful hit this year. It will return next year according to gallery owner Patsy Kline. Many of the images in this show, which closed on March 11, were composed by placing or swooshing paint-wetted breasts on paper by about 100 breast bearers, including three men.
"We wanted to do a collaboration which lead to community art which lead to different causes, which lead me to the concept of doing (breast) exams with paint on your hands and creating art with a purpose," said Ms. Kline. "This is art that all women would be able to create and display with pride. Art that could be all colors — the colors that best represented the participant's personal story. My aunt died of breast cancer and this is a homage to her lovely memory."
The show was conceived after Kline and four associates decided they wanted to have a show to raise funds for a local cause. After some research they selected the northeast Ohio affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Inc. who agreed to participate.
A visitor walking into the gallery immediately encountered a set of breast prints on one sheet titled, "The Girls." Kline said: "We want to encourage all women, especially young women who may not consider their risks or who feel fearful of doing a breast self-exam, to become familiar with what their breasts normally look and feel like with the help of colorful, self-painted body prints."
A refreshing interlude it is to encounter what non-commercial, non-sexualized, natural breasts look like with multiple colors and layers of paint. Said the show's news release: "Make a statement, don't be pink, be every color, and give breast cancer the boot. Create art for your own sake and the sake of all women and men."
Kline pointed out several of the pieces and told stories about them. One image had a vibrant blue circle on one side and a breast print on the other. My first time around the gallery I wondered about this piece. Ms. Kline explained that this artist had a mastectomy of one of her breasts.
As with many women, breast size was an issue for another of the contributors when she was young. When she grew older, she was still self-conscious about her breast size. Then she had breast cancer and a mastectomy. It was then that she realized size dosen't matter at all. There are more important things in life.
Several groups got together to make their prints. Four women collaborated printing themselves all on one large piece of paper. And "ten girls who work at Phoenix Coffee all got together at someone's home and had a party. They set up a paint station in a bedroom where each of them could do their prints in privacy, while the rest dined on hors d'oeuvres and drank wine in the adjoining room," said Kline. "They came to me with their prints and told about their party. I said, 'What? You had a party (to make such personal prints)!' I never thought about having a party to do this!"
At first they were going to limit entries to people 18 years old and up. Then a mother approached who wanted to include her 16-year-old daughter. Eventually several mothers teamed up to produce prints with their daughters. "Quite a few children where at the opening," said Kline.
The majority of people who submitted a print were affected by breast cancer in one way or another, either knowing someone that has had the disease or had it themselves. Some of the prints showed exactly where they found a lump in their breast. "They wanted people know where to look for lumps," she said. "And men can also get breast cancer too," someone said.
Tracy van der Kuil, Gallery Ü's assistant director was asked, "Doesn't the word 'pink' in 'ReThink Pink' limit you to only pink breasts?" Ms. Van der Kuil responded, "remember the word 'rethink' is in front of 'pink.' What does that do?" Then someone nearby answered, "Open it up to more than pink."
The closing featured a showing of "Breast Crack," a video installation by Bernadette Gillota and Annetta Marion, directors of the Ohio Independent Film Festival.
"As far as I know this (a show like ReThink Pink) has not been done by any other gallery or organization anywhere," said Kline. One hundred percent of the proceeds from the sale of prints, which were sold in a silent auction and still being tallied, are being given to the foundation. She aims to stage ReThink Pink shows in New York City, Chicago and Rotterdam Netherlands next year.
The gallery has built alliances with national and international galleries and artists such as the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts in St. Bonaventure New York; the Cleveland State University Art Gallery; the Lazzaro-Signature Gallery of Fine Art in Stoughton Wisconsin; and Robert Carroll in Rome Italy. They are also developing an international artist exchange program scheduled to start this autumn.
Along with Patsy Kline and Tracy Van der Kuil the gallery staff and ReThink Pink organizing committee included Shelly Gracon, media relations assistant; Ed van der Kuil, gallery assistant; Mike McNamara, exhibit installer; and Sarah Marino, gallery attendant.
"Germination:Reformation," apparently another thinking and feeling show, featuring the paintings of Debra DeGregoria and Kevin Shahan, is coming to Gallery Ü on March 18 6-9 p.m. The opening features live musical performances by Tokyo Shapiro at 6 p.m. and dot.(ARTpop) at 8 p.m.
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10/20/04
Northern Ohio Live
Honorable Mention: 2004 Awards of Achievement
Leave it to a mulit-gallery exhibition titled The Buddha Project: Visual Manifestations of Buddhist Thought in the Western World to contemplate so complex a question: How is the transfer of Buddhist ideas from Eastern to Western cultures expressed in contemporary visual art? Using works that represented Buddhism both as tradition and abstract idea, The Buddha Project, (curated by CSU’s Jeanne Grossetti and Robert Thurmer) featured paintings, photographs, works on paper, sculpture and new media to explore different aspects of the religion. Co-curators involved in the exhibit were Cleveland State’s Center for Sacred Landmarks, Arts Collinwood, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Shambhala Meditation Group, Cleveland Zazen Group, ColdWater Zendo, Gallery Ü Cleveland, Insight Meditation of Cleveland, Jewel Heart Cleveland, Jijuyu-ji Zen Group of Cleveland, Performers and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Thrive: An Artspace and West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church.
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05/23/03
The Plain Dealer
ART MATTERS
Abstract Artists Make Most of Ideal ARTcade setting
by Dan Tranberg
Some art galleries are like white cubes. The relatively new Gallery Ü , part of the ARTcade in downtown Cleveland's Colonial Marketplace, is like a glass box.
As with all of the shops inside the arcade, the wide and unusually shallow gallery space has a completely transparent facade, making it look like one big display window. Its clean lines and stark, uncluttered design make it a perfect setting for contemporary art.
This month's exceptionally attractive exhibition at Gallery U features works by Richard Lazzaro and Edward Shalala, two out-of-town artists with direct ties to Cleveland.
Lazzaro is an emeritus professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-owner of an art gallery in Stoughton, Wis. He's also a 1959 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. His works, collectively titled "The Taiwan Series," loosely play off of the general idea of Chinese calligraphy, though they don't look the slightest bit Asian. With their colorful, free-form calligraphic lines, they more closely resemble funky American fabric designs from the 1950s.
Lazzaro is clearly well-versed in the subtleties of form and color. Every one of his paintings on paper is characterized by a precarious balance of bold shapes and delicate lines, all swimming around in undulating waves of color. In some, his playful lines accumulate into dense thickets that practically vibrate from the intensity of their shifting hues.
While Lazzaro's orientation appears to come directly out of Abstract Expressionism, the work of Shalala is more closely aligned with current trends in abstract painting. His handsome group of small, heavily textured canvases, titled "Syntheses: Color and Texture," places great emphasis on the physical, organic properties of paint.
A Cleveland native who moved to New York in 1978, Shalala seems to build his paintings like relief sculptures. He gradually accumulates a mixture of paint and burlap, which eventually takes on the look of heavy weathering. Adding a certain dynamic tension is the objectlike quality of Shalala's canvases, most of which are a foot or so tall and less than a foot wide. They are little constructions as much as they are paintings, which is interesting considering painting's long history of flatness.
Distinguishing them from the abstract paintings of decades past is their extreme focus on the materiality of paint, which brings into question the nature of paint as an object in and of itself. In a sense, they are like paintings of paint.
Gallery curator Patsy Kline, a designer who graduated in 1990 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, deserves accolades for assembling such a thoughtfully focused show.
Hopefully, it's just one of many to come.
The ARTcade is at 530 Euclid Ave., Cleveland; the exhibit is up through May 31. Call 216-323-0085.
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5/1/03
angle magazine
a journal of arts + culture
Richard Lazzaro and Ed Shalala @ Gallery Ü
By Douglas Max Utter
The aesthetic implications of marking and layering have been among the principal expressive considerations of painters and printmakers during the past half-century. Ed Shalala and Richard Lazzaro are two Cleveland-born artists who have enjoyed a degree of national and international exposure over the past four decades exploring these critical issues.
Shalala’s double suite of small paintings face each other from the end walls of Patsy Kline’s Gallery Ü. Lumpy and colorful, each is a phase of self-examination that alternately delves into and covers over the psychological hints that it discovers. These process-oriented, essentially surrealist works emphasize the psychic dimensions of a painted surface, and the rich associations evoked by complex textures. Obsessive almost to an extreme, Shalala’s oil, burlap, and string-on-canvas compositions often include as many as forty layers of paint on surfaces measuring between 8” x 12” to 16” x 20.”
Two Blues and Yellow is typically enigmatic. Its uneven accumulation of paint over burlap patches suggests forms in the way an abstract sculpture might. Raised, smoothed bas-relief-like encrustations of deep blue alternate with shallow ravines where sparks and rivulets of luminous yellow are visible, suggesting light and energy. Meanwhile, the regular pattern of the burlap weave contributes areas of more orderly terrain to a vision that seems like a relief map or heat-sensitive, infra-red study of repression and the intricate flow of psychic energy.
Richard Lazzaro’s Taiwan paintings are visually pleasing gouache-on-paper studies of human intimacy, moving blithely from the abstract qualities of interlocking lines to an overlying, more deliberately figurative, macrocosmic dimension. The emotional content of Lazzaro’s work is more overt than Shalala’s, but while a painting like his 25” x 35” Kiss strives for a degree of equivalence between paint and intricate webs of human feeling, it also conveys a sense of humor and contains a sort of art-historical, visual essay. The three ovate forms in Kiss intersect, describing an overlapping of bodies and lives. Only the central “head” has a profile. On the right an orange, maze-like spiral is emblematic of pregnancy. The cool greens and blues of the central couple complement each other, while around them hot yellow lines create a densely passionate conversation. At the same time, another sort of conversation is visible: Mark Tobey chats with Brice Marden, while Philip Guston shares his thoughts with Jean DuBuffet.
posted by Patsy Kline Arts, Etc. at 11:08 AM
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