The Philip Slein Gallery: Friday, 22 March 2013

Cheonae Kim, Mom, flashe on panel, 2012, 12" x 18"

CHEONAE KIM'S PORTRAIT AT PHILIP SLEIN GALLERY


Reception: Friday, March 22nd, 2013, 6-8 pm
runs through April 27th
 
Cheonae Kim's exhibit of recent paintings at the Philip Slein Gallery, entitled Portrait, continues her personal exploration of geometric abstraction, with a twist. Some abstract painters combine an expressionistic mentality with a minimalist aesthetic. Like the most expressionistic of the Abstract Expressionist painters, Cheonae uses the simplest form, color and structure to portray her experience of people, places, and things.


With a rigorous visual language, Cheonae portrays her experience of people such as her friends and family, places such as Spain, things such as light and sound. And for Cheonae, it is moments rather than events she is interested in. She prefers to focus our attention on a moment, an impression. Her small scale creates an intimacy that draws the viewer into the work. The paintings are perfectly crafted wooden squares or rectangles, usually one inch deep, painted top and sides with brightly colored stripes or rectangles. The overall impression of the show is one of sunshine daydream, and yet the largest piece, the only large-scale piece in the show, is a bright red and blue cloud of thinly-striped dissonance entitled Murmur, which is a sound Cheonae likens to the distant hum of media and technology.

PHILIP SLEIN GALLERY PROVIDES THE INTRODUCTIONS  

Shaun O'Dell, Shifting Strips, 2012, gouache and ink on paper mounted on canvas mounted on panel, 24" x 20"

Introductions, at the Philip Slein Gallery, features small-scale work by five artists showing in St. Louis for the first time: Todd Chilton, Lori Ellison, Shaun O'Dell, James Sterling Pitt, and Altoon Sultan. Ken Johnson writes of Todd Chilton's paintings: "Todd Chilton's argyle pattern made of cake-frosting-thick horizontal lines resembles something by the mystic polymath Alfred Jensen." Sarah Schmerler writes of Lori Ellison: "Lori Ellison makes labor-intensive paintings and drawings that deliver far more optical impact and psychological resonance than you'd expect from small-scale work." Peter Plagens describes Shaun Odell's paintings as "wavering along that line between genuinely obsessive variations on a theme and the mere convenience of near uniformity. What tilts the verdict in Mr. O'Dell's favor are subtle intricacies in color and carefully integrated collage elements..." Gwen Allen writes that the motifs employed in James Sterling Pitt's sculptures "call to mind any number of scientific diagrams that map geological or biological structures." And Rob Colvin writes of Altoon Sultan's paintings and textiles: "Both bodies of work display a rich interaction with the history of abstract painting--sometimes it's by quotation and homage, other times by extending formal projects from various historical periods."


Hours: Tues.-Sat. 10am-5pm
 
The Philip Slein Gallery
314.621.4634 
4735 McPherson Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63108