ALEX COUWENBERG: Working Space
April 25 – May 31, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, April 25th, from 6 to 9 pm
Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Alex Couwenberg. For several years, Couwenberg has forged a unique reputation in California by producing a distinctive body of work that is a product of his obsession with the process of painting. The paint, pin striping, and finish associated with hot rod and custom car culture all show up as influences in his work. Mid-century design, furniture, and architecture, surf and skateboard culture, color and graphics, geometric and hard-edge abstraction, and the love of craft and technique all fuel the
work. Applying paint to a surface and the experiences that occur while creating an image are the purest form of his motivation. The paintings themselves diagram the process of paint application and the interpretation of how these influences manifest themselves in the form of shape, color, texture, and space. Each of his painting becomes an experience of constantly juxtaposing elements and forms within a composition attempting to arrive at a relationship between balance, tension, and harmony.
Alex Couwenberg: Working Space, is his first exhibition in St. Louis. The exhibition includes 10 paintings all done in 2008. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Peter Frank accompanies this exhibition.
In the Project Room, Shawn Burkard is showing his recent work in an exhibition titled “Over and over and over”. Burkard's work has been variously described as Pop Art, because of its source from functional objects and incorporation of commercial and industrial materials; and as Minimal Art, because of its geometric forms and solid presence.
In the New Media Room, multidisciplinary artist Jill Downen premieres a short video titled “Cornerstone”. Downen, known for her white on white wall installations of abstracted bodily forms emerging from architecture, continues to draw on the idea that the human body shares an interdependent relationship to buildings. The three minute video zooms in on a stack of real bricks on the artist's own body. The simple act of breathing, under the weight of building materials, captures a moment of time that is humorous, visceral, and vulnerable. The subtle and rhythmic sensibility Downen brings to video poses metaphoric possibilities about gravity, support and the protection of human fragility within the frame of architecture.
BRUNO DAVID GALLERY
3721 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD
SAINT LOUIS MO 63108
314.531.3030
GALLERY HOURS: Wed –Sat 10:00 – 5:00pm
