JOAN LURIE
Muriel Guépin Gallery is pleased to present a summer group show called “Garden on Orchard”, part of a larger group show featuring 6 Lower East Side galleries -all located within 2 blocks on Orchard street. The show at the Muriel Guépin Gallery includes artworks from six women artists who all showcase overarching themes of gardens and nature in their work. With each artist utilizing a different medium, the theme of nature and life cycle in general are explored with various angles and a fresh perspective.
Isabelle Menin creates portraits of flowers that are not only gorgeous in form and color, but also uniquely expressive. Fresh blossoms and withering blooms melt into each other in dreamy washes of color and hazy drips and swirls. Hues and flowers are reflected in pools of water, as forms disintegrate and reappear in trickles and indistinct glimmers of light. The world she creates within her limited edition of photographs is one where the chaos of the natural world becomes what is the key to its intense beauty. The fairytale-like quality in her work is idyllic-- showing the inherent beauty of nature, but also an eerie underlying sense of drama. Her works are a metaphor for existence.
Susanna Bauer’s embroidered dried leaves marry the natural world back together with the manmade. Her intricate editions of crochet and sewing join the two worlds together in an almost seamless manner. Her delicate shaping of the leaves give them all a life of their own; they dance and sway even without the wind. It almost seems like Bauer is mending the dried leaves, as an antique restorer, inviting us to slow down and open our eyes to the small details and the preciousness of the world that surrounds us. There is a fine balance in her work between fragility and strength, vulnerability and resilience reflecting nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings.
Daru Jung Hyang Kim ‘s abstract paintings display great creativity and attention to detail, combining narrative, poetry and natural beauty. Elements of nature are the starting point for her work, filtered through memories and sensation of particular moments - fluttering of a butterfly, the splash of a raindrop or flickering lights through the morning mist. The works combine foggy and broadly brushed mists of color with schematic depictions of flowers, geometric shapes and other simple, recognizable forms. The overall impression is of vague memories or a dream.
Joan Lurie aims to explore relationships between nature, technology, science and the human body, into its ceramic form. Lurie’s sculptures focus primarily on ceramic making from porcelain, creating sculptures in monotone colors inspired by forms found in nature and complex manmade buildings. Lurie’s newest sculptures, however, aim to capture a more complex aesthetic and explore the use of colors. The way they are sculpted, painted, and presented are reminiscent of colors and themes present in nature—like decay and growth- but also of post WWII architecture and abstract expressionist.
Katia Santibañez abstract drawings and paintings mimic patterns found in nature and incorporate a variety of geometry, symmetry and repetition. She explains her work by asserting that she creates a harmony between nature, architecture, and art where ideas of power, structure, beauty, order and balance all coincide and interact accordingly. In her reconstruction of natural patterns using shapes, and structures, she explores aspects of texture, color, and illusion. Within her work, we are left to rethink the core markers of nature.
Esther Traugot explores her own connection to the natural world with intricately crocheted sculptures that evoke nature’s preciousness and fragility. In her work, gold-colored thread hand-dyed by the artist creates a skin that wraps snugly around or within seeds, eggs, shells, branches, vines, roots, or fallen insects. This golden wrapping references the gilding of precious objects as well as the protective cover of bandages. The results are enchanting and heart breaking at the same time.
