Phillip Buntin Exhibition

For Immediate Release:

RHV Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Warren, Ohio based artist Phillip Buntin.

Phillip Buntin
March 10 – April 11, 2010
Reception for the artist: Sunday, March 14 from 6-8pm

Brooklyn, New York – February 18, 2010 – Pulling diagrams from a variety of sources as broad as internal medicine, psychology, chemistry and physics Phillip Buntin coalesces imagery into not quite functional pictographic explanations of complicated ideas. Although not explicitly referencing Marcel Duchamp's pseudo-science or the fictional physics that allows for space travel in numerous movies and TV shows Buntin's paintings have a logic all their own that results in multi-layered complex compositions that seem to “work” even if the viewer isn't quite sure how. Buntin's visual metaphors seek to express the “experience of generating interpretations (or understandings) of complex things, ideas and experiences.” This exhibition, Buntin's first with RHV Fine Art will feature 12 oil and acrylic paintings on panel (20” x 20” and 16” x 16”).

Phillip Buntin received a Bachlor of Science in psychology from Kennesaw State Univ, Kennesaw, GA in 1989 and his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, Ga in 1997. He earned an MFA from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT in 2002. He teaches at Kent State University's Warren OH, campus where he lives and maintains his studio.

Located in Brooklyn’s burgeoning South Slope, Robert Henry Vintage is a distinctly personal selection of mostly 60’s and 70’s modernism for the home. Coupled with the compelling contemporary art of some of New York’s and the nation's most exciting emerging artists, RHV is the perfect place to find unique home furnishings that reflect your discerning eye and elegant sophistication.

To see more of Phillip's work, click here.

Contact:
Robert Walden or Henry Chung
(718) 473-0819
or click here to send an email.

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Colin Keefe Exhibition

February 3rd – March 10, 2010
Reception for the artist: Saturday, February 13th from 6–8pm

Brooklyn, New York – January 5th, 2010. Colin Keefe makes meticulously crafted plan views of fictitious built environments. Although drawn heavily from architectural pictorial schema Keefe's sculpture and ink and pencil drawings explore "methods for breeding buildings." This exhibition will focus on Keefe's Architectural Pollination series which implements a biological interpretation of a city's evolution, each drawing resembling a microscope slide teaming with life. In this petri dish of architectural spaces buildings breed, consume one another, fuse and fission. Keefe sees this process as manipulating different strategies for acquiring desirable properties from one building to another to make a better building. A natural selection for architecture, he employs the reproductive and propulsion methods of single and multi-cellular organisms as well as pollination methods of plants that gives new meaning to terms like 'organic architecture' and 'green building'.

Keefe earned his BFA from Washington University (St Louis) in 1990 and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1994. He was a resident of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Downtown Residency Program in 2004. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and maintains his studio in Philadelphia, PA.

For inquiries please contact us at (718) 473-0819 or by email.

Andrew Zarou Exhibition

January 3 – January 31, 2010
Reception for the artist: Sunday, January 10th from 6-8pm

RHV Fine Art is please to announce an exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn, NY based artist Andrew Zarou.

As a teenager Andrew Zarou was fascinated by the Cold War Era short wave radio transmissions that covert agents used to send coded messages around the world. Inherent in his deep interest in these broadcasts was his lack of understanding. In essence, his ignorance of the meaning of these electronic messages formed the basis of his interest. The random, repetitive lists of numbers and odd tone sequences riveted him as a child and forms the basis for Andrew's visual vocabulary today.

Zarou's mixed media collages on paper draw from a rich history of recontextualization in this medium begun by the Dadaists some 100 years ago. His images are rhythmic compositions of found images, graph paper, spray paint, aluminum foil and paper scraps. The meaning of the constituent parts of each composition are in most cases lost to the viewer. However, this loss of meaning allows us the opportunity to construct our own meanings in the very same way Andrew did with the clandestine broadcasts in his youth. By working rapidly and in opposition to his natural inclination for order Zarou seeks to build spaces and map topographies through time, space and repetition.

Andrew Zarou has exhibited institutions and galleries nationally including, the Brooklyn Public Library (2008), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, NY (1999). He was an artist in residence at The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavik, Iceland (2008) and at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida (2009) and in 2008 received a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. He received his BA in art from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA in 1994 and maintains his studio in Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood.





For inquiries please contact us at (718) 473-0819 or by email.

Jerry Walden Exhibition

RHV Fine Art is please to announce an exhibition of paintings by South Carolina-based artist Jerry Walden.

November 15 – December 20, 2009
Reception for the artist: Sunday, November 15th from 5-8pm

Three years ago, a diagnosis of cancer provided artist Jerry Walden the impetus for reflection. Looking back over his career, he felt much of his work was no longer visually valid. To reenergize both himself and his work, he began blocking out parts of his original paintings, covering some parts, leaving others to show through. In Deconstructing Jerry #40 (pictured at right, below), for example, the artist took his 1971 painting, Hi-way Drive-in, rotated it and painted over some of the original colors. By combining parts of his work that he finds valid with new layers of paint, he creates reinvigorated patchworks that have a life of their own. This process of painting out has allowed Jerry to reengage pure formalism. By working abstractly, Walden has the freedom to explore a straightforward visual idea, unencumbered by references to our lived experience and all of its attendant baggage. For Walden, this is a purity of search: a way of crossing out reference to anything outside the work and realizing a valid visual idea that is about painting, nothing more and nothing less.

This transformation of old work in to new work is the basis of Walden’s first exhibition with RHV Fine Art. However, this exhibition will also include entirely new paintings made with the same process but on fresh canvas or paper (Reconstructing Deconstructing Jerry #45, pictured at left, below). Jerry begins each painting by randomly taping off areas with blue painters tape or cream-colored masking tape and filling in the space with paint. As he uses this tape over and over again filling the painting with stripes this tape collects layers of previously painted color. Eventually the paint encrusted tape is left in place and actually becomes part of the painting. The process of painting out his old work, begun three years ago, rejuvenated Mr. Walden's purpose. Freed from the constraints of work and children Mr. Walden says, “ I am finally doing what I should have done 30 years ago.”

In over 30 years of studio practice Jerry Walden’s work has been exhibited across the US and around the world. His work is in numerous public and private collections. He earned his BFA from Auburn University, Auburn, AL, in 1968, and his MFA from the Univ. of Georgia in 1971. He lives and works in Rock Hill, SC.

Mike Childs Exhibition

Mike Childs
October 7 – November 8, 2009

RHV Fine Art is please to announce an exhibition of drawings and paintings by NY based artist Mike Childs.

In over 15 years of studio practice Childs has developed a minimal, mainly abstract language of patterns, symbols, structural logic and colors derived from photographs of Modern buildings he has taken of buildings in Toronto, Canada and New York City. Of particular interest to him is what he describes as, “a fascination with the half-built, often found at construction or demolition sites.” This fascination is revealed in his work through introductions of large biomorphic color fields that create visual tension and subvert the geometric structure of the painting. He views each painting as, “either on its way to being finalized, or on its way to being half destroyed.” This coupling of opposites, biomorphic with geometric or irrational with rational, or the built with the unbuilt is for Childs a method for embracing and subverting abstraction in an effort to find meaning in contemporary image making. This constantly changing urban environment and how humans negotiate this space is of main concern to Childs. His work is an examination of a culturally dictated perspective as revealed in image making.

Mike Childs received his BFA from the University of Guelph, Canada, and an MFA from Florida State University. He is the recipient of several awards including a Pollock-Krasner Grant and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Project Award. His work has been exhibition nationally and internationally. He maintains a studio in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan.

For inquiries please contact us at (718) 473-0819 or by email.

James Cullinane Exhibition

James Cullinane
September 6 – October 4, 2009

RHV Fine Art is please to announce an exhibition of drawings, collages and mixed media paintings by Queens, NY based artist James Cullinane.

For more than 10 years Mr. Cullinane has been exploring the metaphorical power and psychological significance of children's book and dictionary illustrations. Through laborious process Cullinane transforms illustration into complex, often seemingly nonsensical images that float somewhere between the figurative and non-figurative. In the Vault series Cullinane flips, turns and inverts copies of a dictionary illustration of a Gothic arch into geometric abstractions as in Vault Rift 9 and adheres them to a poster pinup board on panel with glue and black or white map pins. The illustrations are architectural yet flat and two dimensional while the map pins rise above the surface simultaneously reminding the viewer of the illusion of dimension in the illustration and the actual dimension of the pins and panel. The tension between fictional or implied space and physical space is central to Cullinane's studio practice. For this artist, process is the best avenue for exploring the tension between these two types of spaces. This process, “has to do with finding a way to move beyond what I think I know about an image…” to arrive at something more meaningful.

In another series involving illustrations from a Spanish fascist exercise book for children, the artist layers and inverts multiple copies of children at play. Sometimes the image is reproduced in nothing but map pins (silver, black or white or a combination of the three) as in, Jacob Legna diptych. The obvious intensity of the source material here needs no mention, however, this meaning is lost to the viewer even more than the images are lost through the process of repetition, inversion and/or layering.

In his dictionary collages Mr. Cullinane set himself an algorithm of combining two words with their respective illustrations. The results are tiny black and white collages of strange new oddities like a Gloxigen Mask, which is a word and image combination of glockenspiel and oxygen mask. Cullinane's images may be enigmatic but they are physically layered and contain multiple metaphorical meanings.

James Cullinane received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in 1979. He lives and works in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY.

For inquiries please contact us at (718) 473-0819 or by email.

Robert Walden Exhibition

RHV Fine Art is pleased to announce the exhibition of new work by Brooklyn, NY based artist Robert Walden.

Robert Walden
July 26 – August 22, 2009

Robert Walden’s Ontological Road Maps suggest aerial views or maps of elaborate urban zones complete with housing developments, industrial areas, and business districts. However the accustomed crisp printing of ordinary maps gives way to the insistent presence of the hand of the artist, as one imagines him making each of the fine delicate lines that constitute his webs of transit networks.

Outworn as the trope may seem, the trace left by the artist’s gesture has lost none of its power to evoke the existence of its maker. It is the record of a moment in time, the passage of which is felt through the accumulation of marks. However, each drawing also offers a concentrated, telescoped view of each and all of the moments of its making. This representation of time as both sequential and as simultaneous representation of innumerable moments is akin to the way that the aerial views in the works represent space. One moves through space in a linear manner, cruising down a road (one of the lines in the drawings), or following a present flight path. However, when a space is viewed from above that experience of progress is condensed, as its visual parameters are delimited by the edges of the airplane window, just as the time period that the drawings represent can be located between a specific beginning and ending moment.

This notion of two simultaneous modes of understanding – the linear, experiential mode of moving through time and space, and the synthetic, instantaneous mode through which the whole may be grasped all at once (however superficially) also holds true for the modes of communication evokes by the works. Making a mark on paper may suggest written language, but the artist’s abstract mark most often relies on a very different mechanism of expression, acting as a signal that communication without structures or syntax is in operation.

The tension between the mark as a vehicle of symbolic meaning and as the bearer of a more indeterminate yet also more direct meaning is high lightened by the imagery, which alludes to maps of specific places without naming them. We recognize the drawings as maps, and can readily identify the cities as New World by their grids, and twenty-first city by their suburban culs de sac and exurban sprawl, but they act as symbolic stand-ins for communication about the navigation of places in time.

Thought their conceptual sophistication is undeniable, one of the main things that makes these drawings and paintings work is their recognizability. Since anyone who wanders into a gallery has almost certainly seen a map before, there is a fairly comfortable point of entry into the conceptual and visual world before us. We can readily see that the artist has engaged in his own process not only of drawing but of map-making and by extension of creating roads and a place. What’s fascinating about this is that it places the viewer firmly at the center of the networks of transportation and commerce painstakingly traced out by the artist, calling attention to the viewer’s own temporal position, physical location and state of being.

Robert Walden lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant and was a fellow at the Edward Albee Foundation. Walden’s work has been seen throughout the United States.

For inquiries please contact us at (718) 473-0819 or by email.