A SUMMER SHOW: Featuring Gallery and Invited Artists

Exhibition:

A SUMMER SHOW: Featuring Gallery and Invited Artists

Dates: July 7 - August 31, 2006

Monday - Friday, 11am to 6pm
August by appointment

MICHAEL BILSBOROUGH illustrates figures entangled in the perennial problems of sexual confrontation, of gender posturing and of group dynamics. Gender hierarchy dissolves into gender anarchy. A recent graduate of the Masters program at SVA, Bilsborough uses a carefully calculated drawing style, based in measurement and correction, which challenges the visceral, spontaneous nature of the behavior it depicts. It's the Cool looking at the Hot, the Clean looking at the Dirty.

ROBERT BRINKER premieres large cut paper collages, drawn with thick, dark pencil lines. They are layered with other sheets of cut paper and reflective Mylar that toy with space and illusion, sourced from coloring books, cartoon characters and adult comic books. The drawn lines refer to innocence and truth, and the loss of them. The title "Redrawn and Quartered" acts as a hint that these pieces are not as cute and sweet as a mermaid or a little princess. They too have a dark side and fantasies.

DIETMAR BUSSE presents his new work of emotionally-charged winter landscapes and discovered moments from the small village in Northern Germany in which he was born. Shot on film without any digital manipulation, his array of empty fields and single trees are frontal and direct. His portraits of animals, dead and alive, portray "universals" and clues. Busse's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Modern Painters, Art + Auction, Visionaire and many other publications.

KEVIN CLARKE started his journey into meta-portraiture in 1978. By taking photographs of each clerk in each department of the posh Western Berlin store KaDeWe. This translates into a series of perfect portraits, which together provide a cultural snapshot, a concept that would be repeated in his later Red Couch series. These prints are only now being released by Clarke for the first time.

DAVID FRIED has three separate yet connected bodies of work: his Self Organizing Still Life sculptures, his Rainscapes and his Stemmers sculpture. All are explorations of dynamic networks and fundamental relationships, achieved through interplay between handmade spheres or via patterns of raindrops or via genetic osmosis. The work also refers to phenomenae we can barely grasp and hints at our abilities and desires to alter complex interdependent systems we cannot fully comprehend.

MAKOTO FUJIMURA combines abstract expressionism with the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga. He uses ground minerals applied to watercolor paper with animal-hide glue. Every aspect is handmade. Fujimura shows here a rare triptych on a vintage Japanese screen. Fujimura is the youngest artist ever to have had a piece acquired by Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and currently has a museum exhibition at the Katzen Center and three pieces in the City of London Festival with Yoko Ono.

G.H. HOVAGIMYAN is an experimental artist working in a variety of forms. He was one of the first artists in New York to start working with the Internet in the early Nineties. Here he premieres his Rantapod, a video meditation on art, politics and philosophy. Contrary to Post Modernism's simulation and irony this is a serious ongoing investigation. It strips away all artifice and presents a minimal/punk video discourse. The series is an outgrowth or continuation of GH's conceptual and network performance starting in the 1970s.

CHRISTINA McPHEE presents new large-scale images from her acclaimed Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, a meditation on seismic memory and identify along the San Andreas Fault in California. The landscape is a riddle of identity: who is in place, is place persona(e)? Seismic data, together with layers of documentary video stills, film and digital photography imply both a landscape of information and a physical presence. The persona of the artist disappears within the digital trace.

ROGER RICCO constructs what he refers to as Small Events and Night Sets, elegant compositions of light and motion that create baroque scenarios that inhabit a space somewhere between photography and more painterly areas. In the early 1980s, Ricco established one of the first galleries in New York devoted entirely to American Folk, Self-Taught and Outsider Art and currently co-runs Ricco/Maresca.

DUSTON SPEAR premieres the first public viewing of her work directy on walls. This "wall tattoo" is one in an edition of three. The characters are the boy soldier in a cocky stance, the new American Gothic couple, both ready to bomb themselves and others. The gear at the base of the tatt references the 'if you see something say something' mantra of our changed society-the stenciled backpack holds both a homemade bomb and a WWII gas mask.

MARIALUISA TADEI creates art that bridges the gap between the material world and the spiritual dimension, between the seen and the unseen aspects of our selves and our existence. Based in Italy and a member of the prestigious Royal British Society of Sculptors, she refers to materials and media which historically have been associated with beauty and seduction; and whose lyricism, transparency and lightness allude to the materiality and spirituality of our existence.

CONRAD VENTUR is the publisher of Useless Magazine. But he got there through his chic photographs of downtown celebs such as Avenue D and Phiiliip. Here, Ventur premieres an image of his cell phone photos, prescient snapshots of actual messages he receives via mobile. They lend a sense of espionage and tenderness to our technological addictions.

KARINA WISNIEWSKA was originally a pianist. In 1997, she was nominated Swiss Musician of the Year and a celebrity among the classical music circuit. Since 2000, she has concentrated on visual works. Critic Barbara Bürer compares her paintings to "modern compositions, in which rigid staves have no place. Beautiful chaos, not always. White on white, acrylic tracks, filled with quartz sand that lies glittering in plastic buckets. Haikus, resembling genuine oriental calligraphy, applied with energy and enriched with imagination."

SARA TECCHIA ROMA NEW YORK is located at 529 West 20th Street, between Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue. The gallery is on the second floor. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. For more information, contact 212-741-2900, or visit www.saratecchia.com