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3/3/2009

The Portrait

Tabla Rasa Gallery, New York

curated by Robin Ross and Giustina Surbone

Tabla Rasa Gallery is delighted to host The Portrait: Painted and Personal curated by Robin Ross, and Giustina Surbone. This exhibition presents the viewer an opportunity to see beyond traditional portrait painting. Exhibiting artists include Nana Deleplanque, Robin Gaynes-Bachman, Audrey Anastasi, Robin Ross and Giustina Surbone.

The Portrait: Painted and Personal
Curator's statement:

What is a portrait? It is a painting, drawing, sculpture or photograph of the physical or psychological likeness of a real or imaginary person. Historically, portraits symbolized the majesty, authority or religiosity of a subject. As a means to immortality, the portrait replaced the living presence of the dead.

The Portrait: Painted and Personal, presents the genre of portrait painting with the works of five contemporary figurative painters: Audrey Anastasi, Robin Gaynes-Bachman, Nana Deleplanque, Robin Ross and Giustina Surbone. All combine realism, abstraction and form to create large-scale work.

These five artists work in a personal manner without idealizing the subject. Using traditional rather than conceptual methods, they display mastery without arrogance. Because they are fueled by their experience, personal expression is a priority over faithfully reproducing the subject in their work. Perhaps, in spite of this, the artists capture the physicality and individuality of human identity, sometimes of themselves, sometimes of their subject, sometimes of the intersection of both artist and subject. From this perspective, The Portrait: Painted and Personal invites us to go beyond simply examining the beauty and detail of exquisite painting.

Nana Deleplanque, a French painter living in New York City, creates lush narrative portraits about the physical, mythological and sacred worlds between humans and nature. These dynamic works explore the boundaries between imagination and reality.

Robin Ross' luminous and expressionistic portraits are an invitation to join her on a spiritual journey. Her work reflects the movement in paint that mirrors direction toward the spirit and away from the body. Her paintings incorporate both lone and multiple figures, often based on images of family and friends.

Giustina Surbone, a postmodern portrait painter, works exclusively with single isolated figures against indefinite backgrounds. Her subjects create an imposing presence simultaneously perfect and imperfect, beautiful and grotesque, in all their varied color, texture and translucency.

Robin Gaynes-Bachman, a divisionist painter, lays oil color next to each other to create abstract mosaics of the figure. In her reverse vinyl portrait paintings, she uses house paint, sand, glitter and personal memorabilia to study issues of family, religion and spirituality.

Audrey Anastasi works from life. Her portraits focus mainly on women in contemporary settings. She paints her subjects with a "returned gaze" to challenge the viewer, paralleling historical feminist concerns regarding the depiction of female subjects.

Tabla Rasa Gallery
224 48th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Brooklyn
General gallery hours: 1:00 - 5:00 pm, THURSDAY, FRIDAY & SATURDAY.
free entry

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