Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to announce “Waterways IV,” a group exhibition showcasing themes and interpretations on water, its environment and our interaction with it. On view will be paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints and photography by Will Clift, Beth Dary, Peter Dayton, Betsy Eby, Karen Gunderson, Alex Katz, Wayne Levin, Jonathan Smith, Alex Weinstein and Katherine Young. The exhibition will be held July 13th-September 10th, with an opening reception for the artists on Wednesday, July 13th from 5-7pm.
Sculptor Will Clift embraces balance and form with three-dimensional gestures made of wood and carbon fiber. Inspired by a shape or a movement that has caught his eye, Clift’s work often defies rationale with separate elements coming together in unlikely yet perfect equilibrium. The sculptures are so intuitive they often require the artist himself to install them. Clift is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and his work is in several notable collections and has had many solo and group exhibitions. Most recently he received the International Visiting Artist Prize from Australia’s Sculpture by the Sea, the most visited public sculpture exhibit in the world.
Beth Dary has been included in a number of exhibitions, installations and site-specific collaborations that deal with water and its effects, positive and negative, in our environment. The show will include hand-blown glass sculptures that formed part of “Equilibrium,” a floating public art project held in the pond in Battery Park in New York City. The glass orbs can float in the water, simulating oversized bubbles, or can be displayed on the floor. Other hand-made ceramic sculptures take the form of white barnacles attached to the walls and ceiling. Dary lives and works in New York City.
Peter Dayton emerged into the art scene over two decades ago and is known for appropriating iconic art historical movements to create witty surf board paintings. His brightly colored and highly-glossed long boards emulate the purity of Minimalism, yet the mimicry is a wry commentary on our consumer culture with the added surf brand-name decals. Dayton lives in Long Island and has had numerous group and solo exhibitions. His work is in private, corporate and public collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Chanel USA, New York City.
Betsy Eby contributes a different medium to the show with her skillfully painted encaustic work. A classically trained pianist, Eby is influenced by musical compositions and rhythms, bringing a synthesis of sound and image to her abstracted paintings. Referencing natural phenomena like flowing water or mist, Eby’s work evokes a sense of the spiritual and ethereal. A Northwest native, Eby has enjoyed solo and group exhibitions in the United States and the U.K., and her work is in several museums and corporate collections, including the Tacoma Art Museum and Columbus Museum.
Karen Gunderson hails originally from Wisconsin and has been living most of her life in New York City. She has an enviable group and solo exhibition roster here and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous distinguished honors and awards. The show will feature her highly regarded all-black sea-scape work, where her mastery of technique and raking light reveals the pictorial image on a textured surface. The painted body of water seems to move as the position of the viewer changes when looking at the image. Gunderson’s work can be seen in many collections including the Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, and the Philip Morris Collection in New York City.
Alex Katz is well-known for his large-scale figurative and landscape paintings, and has been a prolific printmaker since the 1960s. Generally acknowledged to be a pre-cursor to Pop Art, Katz went on to achieve a unique, reductive simplicity in his work. His flatness of form and boldness of color presented with emotional detachment are immediately recognizable. Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo and 500 group exhibitions since the early 1950s, showcasing in noteworthy institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 2007 he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum in New York and he holds two Honorary Doctorate Fine Arts degrees.
Wayne Levin’s photography draws the viewer into the mysteries of underwater seascapes, capturing swimmers and surfers from a perspective not privy to the regular spectator. Working in black and white, Levin’s forms silhouetted beneath a frothing surf and suggestions of endless depths take on a nostalgic, even ethereal quality. Levin resides in Hawaii, has an MFA in photography and is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions here and abroad and is seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego, and The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, among others.
Jonathan Smith delivers another perspective to photography in the show, taking his camera above water to capture color imagery of surfers in action. Like Levin’s work, the misty atmosphere of the ocean veils the picture to give it a dream-like quality. Smith earned his B.A. in the UK, where he is originally from, and later received a degree in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center for Photography in New York City, where he currently resides. His work has been the subject of several exhibitions and he has been the recipient of numerous awards of note. Smith’s photographs have also graced the pages of reputable publications such as the Smithsonian and the Royal Photographic Society magazines.
Alex Weinstein’s evocation of the surf is one where serenity and abstraction come together in large, monochromatic paintings. The blue expanse of the ocean becomes one with the horizon line and is indistinguishable from the sky, resulting in a color field image devoid of content. Weinstein’s work presents an almost immersive experience, engulfing the viewer into the contemplative vastness of the ocean. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad, and has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Art in America. Weinstein currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Katherine Young is another West Coast based artist who is also captivated by the ocean. While her interpretation is more literal, her work nevertheless manages to convey the ocean’s scope and breadth. Drawing with pencil on large sheets of paper to show rippled water disappear into infinity, her work looks deceivingly like a photograph. Young has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and is also the recipient of many awards. She has an BSE in Engineering, an MFA, and her steady
hand on paper is also likely influenced by her MD Degree and years as a reconstructive surgeon.
