Groeflin Maag Galerie is pleased to announce HONEYMOON WITH ROMEO a
group show curated by New York-based artist Holly Coulis.
The works included in Honeymoon with Romeo are examples by artists who
make work inspired by love: romantic love, love of painting, love of illusion
and or feeling.
All of the work frames, in some way, a desire for transport, an altered
experience, a romantic excursion. Though similar to traditional ideas of
transcendence in art, the drift in this work is more psychological than
spiritual, more engrossed than pure, and remains entangled with pop culture
and the world of images. All of these artists exhibit an obvious love for their
mediums. Part of the impetus for the making of the work seems to come
from a need to make, a deep affinity and involvement with materials. But for
the most part, the love seems more ethereal, more romantic.
Keith Mayerson’s beautifully handled portrait of James Dean reads not so
much as celebrity painting, but reveals an admiration, a longing for, and a
personal relationship with an iconic face. Maureen Cavanaugh’s lively picture
of a more physical love is amplified by a series of birds diving up through a
pastel sky in the background. Her illustration of emotion is expansive. Portia
Hein, Benjamin Butler, and Yuko Murata have included landscapes, which are
intimately crafted, and serene. There is something honest and direct presented
in each of their works, a romantic poetic found in the balance between touch
and subject, an interior understanding of some external world. Romantic and
dark, the work presented by Bettina Sellmann, Echo Eggebrecht, and Allison
Schulnik seems to draw from literature and a contemporary sense of the gothic,
a melodramatic intersection of life and death. Tam Ochiai’s loose and lovely
drawings embody a directness and sweetness culled from his world of
daydreamy imagery. Ridley Howard’s touchingly painted filmic image of two
diners is reminiscent of nouveau vague cinema in its stillness and love of
beauty. Kiyomichi Shibuya delves into a world of quiet fantasy with an
elegantly constructed piece. It stands as a romantic testament to commitment
and perfection. David Humphreys "Sad Clown" is a tragic, psychological melt.
His lonesome subject is a grand example of his improvisational and uncanny
use of imagery. In Brad Kahlhamer’s watercolor, his fluid use of paint is clear,
as is his empathy for his subject. The grandiosity he emparts to his
protagonists is always rich and moving. Matthew Fishers lonely soldiers
contemplate, fish, cry, and exemplify unfulfilled promises of a grand male
journey. They are pictures of a brokenheart and the resolve that follows.
Katherine Bernhardt’s rambunctious painting of a spiritually infused wild
woman holds a presence of force and feminine panache. Charlotta
Westergren’s contemporary vanitas sits as a loving homage to painting and
the enigma of nature. The dead rabbit floating in a sea of green and ocean
life is a sad and jewel like depiction of mortality and life. Kurt Kaupers
drawing of the famous hockey player Bobby Orr as a tragic symbol of
masculine perfection blurs the longing to have and the longing to be and
hints at a nostalgia for a more innocent understanding of adult masculinity.
Text by Holly Coulis