Gregory Botts & David Wolfe at Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe
Thursday, May 29th, 2008|
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Santa Fe, NM, May 29, 2008 – The Gerald Peters Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibitions Gregory Botts: Fluent Mundo and David Wolfe: Grounded Spirits, both of which run June 13 to July 26, 2008. Artists’ receptions are scheduled for June 13, 5 to 7 pm. The gallery is located at 1011 Paseo de Peralta. Painter Gregory Botts divides his time between New York City and Abiquiu, New Mexico, and his work deftly reflects both of these geographies, as well as the sensibilities they symbolize. “The Eastern landscape is more developed,” explains Botts. “The sublimity of the West does not exist there.” The artist begins each piece by creating a plein air painting and, after moving into his studio, then transforms it into one of his trademark large-scale Western landscapes that seem to exist at the intersection of realism and abstraction. “My aim is to bring the landscape into the contemporary world,” says Botts. Botts attended the School of Visual Arts, in New York, where he was heavily influenced by artists such as Fairfield Porter and Paul George. Inspired by the legacies of Whitman and Kerouac, and the American tradition of the westward sojourn, Botts spent many years traveling cross-country and painting the untouched land he encountered, a process he detailed in a book of poetry entitled clouds, leaves, waves (Turtle Press, 1996). Of Botts’ landscapes, Harold Bloom has written, “Painter and viewer alike gaze upon a freshly abstracted nature as if we had just landed upon it from some other sphere … Botts’ nature is [Wallace] Stevens’ nature, the nature that manifests a transcendental strain, the native strain of our poetry and painting.” Work by Gregory Botts can be found in numerous collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts in Hawaii, and the National Academy of Design. Running concurrent to Botts’s show is an exhibition by David Wolfe, an artist who also explores the Western landscape, but with an emphasis on the smaller scale. With chromatic clarity and a deft eye for photo-realism, he details the minutiae of specific patches of earth and the way the elements therein–flowers, grasses, weeds, and cactus–overlap and interact. For Wolfe, it is about “getting back to moment of discovery.” A native of Colorado, Wolfe has always felt a kinship to the western part of the United States, even as he resided in the Mid-west and East Coast. In 1997, he returned to the West, settling in Santa Fe. On the evolution of his current work the artist says, “In 2000, after painting in a more traditional landscape style, I began to concentrate on the great variety of plant life thriving close to the ground in the high desert landscape around my home. It’s amazing what happens without any encouragement from Mother Nature.” Former New York Times art critic Brian O’Doherty has written of Wolfe’s meticulous paintings, “They speak of obsession, passion, logic, distance, intimacy, literalism, invention, observation, joy, patience, precision – a tangle of properties and inclinations, reflecting a sharp and searching intelligence.” Over a forty-year career, Wolfe’s work has been exhibited at various venues nation-wide, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, and can be seen in numerous permanent collections, such as those of the University of Colorado and the Prudential Insurance Company. Also showing at Gerald Peters Gallery are pieces by California-based sculptor Richard Deutsch and Japanese artist Mikihiro Nishimatsu. See examples. Mikihiro Nishimatsu uses graceful brushstrokes to create gestural pieces that take their inspiration from traditional Japanese calligraphy and experiment with traditional Japanese materials, integrating everything from special hand-made paper and hand-ground ink to pigments made from chestnuts and persimmon juice. Artist Richard Deutsch takes great fascination in the way things are constructed and takes objects out of context to find new modes of expression in them. His work has, over a period of twenty-five years, evolved from small-scale pieces in clay to complex creations of stone, bronze, and wood. “My day-to-day efforts as a sculptor are perhaps similar to those of an inventor and documenter, ” says Deutsch. “Through this system of discovery, I interpret and record my response to what I witness as I search to understand and make order of the physicality of form.” Karen Rogers
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