ROBERT HARMS / HUNT SLONEM
Dates: July 14 – August 25, 2001
Opening Reception: Thursday July 26, 5–7 pm

Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present new paintings by Robert Harms and Hunt Slonem. Although stylistically very different, both of these artists share a confidence and subtlety that make their work engaging as well as complimentary.

Robert Harms’ latest body of work expands upon his use of the landscape of Amagansett, where he lives, to produce energetic and dramatic compositions. He draws upon various sources from Abstract Expressionism to Impressionism to traditional landscape painting to create works that are fresh and unique. His nature-based abstractions often give us a greater sense of nature than we might get from a realistic depiction, however they stand their ground as abstract paintings. It is his deftness with the brush and with color that makes this possible. In Ferry, strokes of creamy pink and orange dance nimbly around bright greens with a liveliness and viscosity that tempt us to touch them. This balance between the initial referent of his works and the luscious surfaces of the final paintings further heighten our attraction to them. As Henry Geldzahler, a supporter of Harms’ work, said in a 1991 catalogue essay: “He produces watercolors …and studio paintings that are both strong and delicate, honest and full of artfulness, and, I find, quite simply beautiful, a word of which we have perhaps become too wary.”

Over the course of his thirty-year career, Hunt Slonem has been creating complex, intriguing paintings that speak to us on conceptual as well as tactile levels. He has continually refined his style, working in a range of visual modes, however his hand is always instantly recognizable. Many of the paintings in this current exhibition feature the grid pattern which he has developed over the past fifteen years and which he is well known for. After putting down areas of color often covered by a layer of gold paint, Slonem goes back into the work with the end of his brush, etching a cross-hatch pattern over the entire face of the canvas, thereby revealing previously hidden layers of color and activating the surface with texture. In this way, he also balances the depth of the painting with an attention to the surface of the picture plane. These grids hold additional meaning when one considers that the subject of Slonem’s canvases are often the numerous birds which he keeps in his studio and which have captivated him his entire life. In this context the grids become cages, transforming the works into allegories of confinement and liberation. They capture the relationship between society and nature, between those systems we erect to organize our lives, but which can also restrict us. His brightly colored, heavily worked paintings show the influence of numerous and diverse sources: from Renaissance frescoes to Rousseau and Matisse to Cubism and beyond, yet they are undeniably contemporary. Whether depicting images of holy figures from Christianity or Buddhism, legendary film stars or anonymous faces, butterflies or birds, Slonem’s works “suggest an underlying universal reality that binds together various levels of human experience, conscious and unconscious.”