Sunday, February 15, 2009
Skins of Light
Skins of Light: An Appreciation
Matt Dibble on display at Tregoning & Company
By Douglas Max Utter
Like half-remembered myths Matt Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade, color and pattern. In his painting Light Wounds of Early Youth, the half- inch dark brown line that defines the figure moves fluidly over a mottled background of pale pastel colors. This flat, uninflected stroke might be used to render a geometric shape in another sort of painting, and here it retains something of that formal, expository quality: it seems as if the figure depicted is a theorem, as much or more than a person. Perhaps each of these characters in recent paintings like Facing Down Giants, Missing Rungs, and Break Ornaments, Spill Food, is a constellation of a sort, a depiction of the imaginary lines that tenuously connect distant explosions of experience, seen or sensed in a painting long after the fact.
For most of the past three decades Dibble has been known mainly as a painter of expressive abstract works that emphasize the physical qualities of the painted surface. These often very active, crowded compositions seem to enact collisions between figure and ground, As with the ambitious, emotive physicality of paintings by Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock from the early 1950’s, Dibble’s works of this type are agons, battles between the artist’s dynamic gesture and the limits of the various surfaces (panel, canvas, etc.) he chooses; on the sidelines we also can sense the usual spectators: the idea of literal depiction, and traces of the self. His Quarry (2005), for instance, which deliberately echoes the dimensions and energies of DeKooning’s seminal Excavation (1950), is an account of violence, but also of concealment. DeKooning’s shattered fragments seem to represent the half-buried carnage of the Second World War, while the paper bag-brown rectilinear shapes that cobble over Dibble’s space might be seen to resemble the iconic hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The source of Dibble’s figurative paintings is an ongoing series of small, lithe ink drawings. As fluid as calligraphy, they are at once the opposite of his tumultuous abstractions, and their complement. While his non-representational works explore as wide a range as possible of the visual incidents that chemistry and gesture can generate, Dibble’s drawings are in equal measure restrained. And yet the paintings which are exact enlargements of these quiet graphic interludes seem like a more sober articulation of the same visceral strain and drama. Limpid in their quietness and crisp, these drawn works are examples of transformation, cutting and pruning the human figure and the space in which it is embedded with sharp triangular sections, like thorns.
In Light Wounds of Early Youth the nude male figure is located, just barely, in interior space. He leans with a distorted limb against a yellow plane, which seems to be part of a room, or the thought of a room. If before leaning the limb was an arm, it has changed; it flattens out at the end and has an armored, spiked appearance. The artist has caught this personage in mid-metamorphosis, as if he were a Celtic selkie just returned from the sea. His stocky, amphibian legs stand on rectangular, toe-less feet, and the room itself is insubstantial with its oddly rounded flor and thinly applied paint, like an hallucination. An even less structured ground flickers within the breast of the creature ; it is tempting to associate the title with this flickering: here are transcendent wounds of light, as well as superficial bodily or emotional injuries -- the sort of marks that Jacob might have received as he wrestled with the angel.
There is often also a sly sense of humor about Dibble’s paintings. In Light Wounds the figure’s stately, almost sculptural head has been placed upside down on his stocky neck, as if he had hastily reassembled himself and got that part completely wrong. Or it could be that he’s just fooling around, enjoying a newfound freedom of posture. There is, really, nothing very definite about him. The few strokes that depict his genitalia are perfunctory and cherubic. He stands balanced on his right leg, with his foot turned inward, like a bashful boy. The curved green floor at his feet and the square, deep blue window behind his left elbow don’t confine his transformation, but frame it. In such paintings Dibble gives us quick maps of meditative states of mind. A graceful torsion bends the figure in Facing Down Giants, for instance. Like Dibble’s other personae, he is cast in a heroic mold, with an exaggeratedly athletic torso. His small head faces skyward and he sits on the ground, as if in a yoga posture, awkwardly graceful and content. Dibble’s spiritual beings are part hero, part clown, tumbling in a world that is no more than a back-drop for their antics. They are perhaps like skins of light, shed in the process of personal change.
Matt Dibble on display at Tregoning & Company
By Douglas Max Utter
Like half-remembered myths Matt Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade, color and pattern. In his painting Light Wounds of Early Youth, the half- inch dark brown line that defines the figure moves fluidly over a mottled background of pale pastel colors. This flat, uninflected stroke might be used to render a geometric shape in another sort of painting, and here it retains something of that formal, expository quality: it seems as if the figure depicted is a theorem, as much or more than a person. Perhaps each of these characters in recent paintings like Facing Down Giants, Missing Rungs, and Break Ornaments, Spill Food, is a constellation of a sort, a depiction of the imaginary lines that tenuously connect distant explosions of experience, seen or sensed in a painting long after the fact.
For most of the past three decades Dibble has been known mainly as a painter of expressive abstract works that emphasize the physical qualities of the painted surface. These often very active, crowded compositions seem to enact collisions between figure and ground, As with the ambitious, emotive physicality of paintings by Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock from the early 1950’s, Dibble’s works of this type are agons, battles between the artist’s dynamic gesture and the limits of the various surfaces (panel, canvas, etc.) he chooses; on the sidelines we also can sense the usual spectators: the idea of literal depiction, and traces of the self. His Quarry (2005), for instance, which deliberately echoes the dimensions and energies of DeKooning’s seminal Excavation (1950), is an account of violence, but also of concealment. DeKooning’s shattered fragments seem to represent the half-buried carnage of the Second World War, while the paper bag-brown rectilinear shapes that cobble over Dibble’s space might be seen to resemble the iconic hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The source of Dibble’s figurative paintings is an ongoing series of small, lithe ink drawings. As fluid as calligraphy, they are at once the opposite of his tumultuous abstractions, and their complement. While his non-representational works explore as wide a range as possible of the visual incidents that chemistry and gesture can generate, Dibble’s drawings are in equal measure restrained. And yet the paintings which are exact enlargements of these quiet graphic interludes seem like a more sober articulation of the same visceral strain and drama. Limpid in their quietness and crisp, these drawn works are examples of transformation, cutting and pruning the human figure and the space in which it is embedded with sharp triangular sections, like thorns.
In Light Wounds of Early Youth the nude male figure is located, just barely, in interior space. He leans with a distorted limb against a yellow plane, which seems to be part of a room, or the thought of a room. If before leaning the limb was an arm, it has changed; it flattens out at the end and has an armored, spiked appearance. The artist has caught this personage in mid-metamorphosis, as if he were a Celtic selkie just returned from the sea. His stocky, amphibian legs stand on rectangular, toe-less feet, and the room itself is insubstantial with its oddly rounded flor and thinly applied paint, like an hallucination. An even less structured ground flickers within the breast of the creature ; it is tempting to associate the title with this flickering: here are transcendent wounds of light, as well as superficial bodily or emotional injuries -- the sort of marks that Jacob might have received as he wrestled with the angel.
There is often also a sly sense of humor about Dibble’s paintings. In Light Wounds the figure’s stately, almost sculptural head has been placed upside down on his stocky neck, as if he had hastily reassembled himself and got that part completely wrong. Or it could be that he’s just fooling around, enjoying a newfound freedom of posture. There is, really, nothing very definite about him. The few strokes that depict his genitalia are perfunctory and cherubic. He stands balanced on his right leg, with his foot turned inward, like a bashful boy. The curved green floor at his feet and the square, deep blue window behind his left elbow don’t confine his transformation, but frame it. In such paintings Dibble gives us quick maps of meditative states of mind. A graceful torsion bends the figure in Facing Down Giants, for instance. Like Dibble’s other personae, he is cast in a heroic mold, with an exaggeratedly athletic torso. His small head faces skyward and he sits on the ground, as if in a yoga posture, awkwardly graceful and content. Dibble’s spiritual beings are part hero, part clown, tumbling in a world that is no more than a back-drop for their antics. They are perhaps like skins of light, shed in the process of personal change.
Cavalcade of Oddballs
Smaller-scale drawings reveal artist's power of personality
Friday, January 20, 2006 Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer
Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at New York's Cooper Union School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.
"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."
If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.
It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces. Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.
Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.
It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.
Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, they always come to me at the oddest moments."
Lewis is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.
Friday, January 20, 2006 Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer
Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at New York's Cooper Union School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.
"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."
If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.
It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces. Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.
Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.
It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.
Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, they always come to me at the oddest moments."
Lewis is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Night Visions
Nights Of The Soul
Tregoning Gallery Revisits Chris Pekoc's Powerful Early Works
By Douglas Max Utter
For the past 20 years, Cleveland-based artist Christopher Pekoc has been known mainly for works created from shards of black-and-white photographs, mixed with other reality-evoking translucent materials and stitched into a provisional whole on a sewing machine. Often, the abrupt transitions of his high-contrast photos are softened with the warm amber tones of shellac or adorned with gold leaf. Decorated and pierced with clean round holes, distressed and crinkled, they evoke a mysterious, dangerous night world, a place where a hand or a bird or a tree may suddenly flare as beacon or portent. Pekoc's textures and imagery speak of the burnt, hard smell of city nights and of identities underlying the daily costume changes of our lives.
Like much art of the last 50 years, Pekoc's nearly sculptural works are rooted in the early modernist discovery of collage and its reintroduction as one of the principal tools of pop art in the early 1960s. Repositioning enigmatic fragments as he inserts them into the abstract space of a painting or drawing has given Pekoc a way to enter his work obliquely, a side door through which the creative act passes unobserved, allowing the artist to transport scenarios directly to the eye as if snatched whole from the unconscious mind.
Pekoc's show Night Visions at Tregoning & Company displays a suite of six smaller mixed-media, photo-based collages made between 1995 and 2002. But the big surprise for newcomers to Pekoc's oeuvre is the presence of some 20 larger canvases and works on paper produced by the artist over a 10-year period starting in the mid 1970s. These are strikingly contemporary-looking works, sometimes painted with an airbrush, or consisting of pastel and charcoal rubbed into etching paper by hand. The consistently smooth-surfaced, hard-edged, oddly ambiguous shapes in works like "In the Middle of the Night" (1982)Êor "Night Watch" (1979) would be at home in any show of up-to-the-minute painting. They seem to reflect contemporary software imaging techniques, apparently referencing an information-driven culture where the abrupt importation and seamless juxtaposition of disparate data is how you get through the day. Yet they were painted well in advance of the contemporary computer age.
"Strike" from 1975, for example, is a three-by-six foot, two-panel composition on canvas dominated by abstract forms rendered in primary colors. The airbrushed acrylic work is reminiscent of its pop-art forbears, especially James Rosenquist's billboard-derived canvases. But there are more differences than similarities between the two. Pekoc has taken Rosenquist's dismemberment of commodity-reality a step or two further. Nothing in his early paintings and drawings reads as a familiar object. Instead, Pekoc presents a cipher of interlocking shapes. And although his vocabulary is made up in large part of sensuous, even luxurious shapes and surfaces, the work doesn't seem to react to consumer culture. The subject matter is personal, dealing with relationships, hopes and fears in coded imagery that sometimes breaks down into dotted lines, letters and mathematical symbols, as in the 1976 painting inscrutably titled "Space Window CDSM12/24p."
Tregoning's installation sketches a history of Pekoc's techniques and the logic of his sensibility across a three-decade span. A narrow, waist-high plexiglass vitrine in the center of the gallery contains a sample study from the mid 1970s, salvaged from one of Pekoc's many studio drawers. It's a postcard-size model for a painting, constructed of pieces of ads cut from a magazine of the period. This sketch-collage was the first stage in a long process that involved making multiple related compositions, photographing them, projecting the resulting slides and composing works piecemeal after tracing outlines on canvas. Even relatively small paintings like those on view took weeks to complete, and large-scale projects required many months of elaborate effort. Pekoc's 20-by-40 foot mural on canvas titled "Night Sky," on permanent exhibit at the west end of the Reading Room at the Cleveland Public Library, was commissioned and installed in 1979. In terms of scale it was the most ambitious effort of that period, but as a composition, it's typical. A kind of maquette - consisting of a study for the painting itself, mounted in a large black-and-white photograph - is included in the Tregoning show and was the centerpiece of his original proposal. In the painting itself, a great pale crest rises smoke-like against a background of glowing gray, emerging from a crumpled riot of deep red and blue. Pekoc worked as a scarfer in a steel mill for a year or so. His translation of the harsh, almost demonic, power and scale of steel production into a new emotional range, using intimate quotations gleaned from the glossy urban nights where Halston and Lauren Hutton reigned, is a metaphorical triumph.
Many of the pieces in Night Visions were composed from the pages of fashion magazines - Vogue in particular. Often, Pekoc used ads for high-end luxury goods, transforming carefully sliced, anonymous commodities into fragmentary symbols. They seem neither manufactured nor natural, but like sensuous theorems - semi-abstract objects at play in a dimension of calm desire. That they seem so fresh as they enter their fourth decade is a tribute to Pekoc's deep sincerity as a lexicographer of personal truths.
Christopher Pekoc: Night VISIONs 1975Ð2000 Tregoning & Company 1300 W. 78th St. Through March 29 216.281.8626
Tregoning Gallery Revisits Chris Pekoc's Powerful Early Works
By Douglas Max Utter
For the past 20 years, Cleveland-based artist Christopher Pekoc has been known mainly for works created from shards of black-and-white photographs, mixed with other reality-evoking translucent materials and stitched into a provisional whole on a sewing machine. Often, the abrupt transitions of his high-contrast photos are softened with the warm amber tones of shellac or adorned with gold leaf. Decorated and pierced with clean round holes, distressed and crinkled, they evoke a mysterious, dangerous night world, a place where a hand or a bird or a tree may suddenly flare as beacon or portent. Pekoc's textures and imagery speak of the burnt, hard smell of city nights and of identities underlying the daily costume changes of our lives.
Like much art of the last 50 years, Pekoc's nearly sculptural works are rooted in the early modernist discovery of collage and its reintroduction as one of the principal tools of pop art in the early 1960s. Repositioning enigmatic fragments as he inserts them into the abstract space of a painting or drawing has given Pekoc a way to enter his work obliquely, a side door through which the creative act passes unobserved, allowing the artist to transport scenarios directly to the eye as if snatched whole from the unconscious mind.
Pekoc's show Night Visions at Tregoning & Company displays a suite of six smaller mixed-media, photo-based collages made between 1995 and 2002. But the big surprise for newcomers to Pekoc's oeuvre is the presence of some 20 larger canvases and works on paper produced by the artist over a 10-year period starting in the mid 1970s. These are strikingly contemporary-looking works, sometimes painted with an airbrush, or consisting of pastel and charcoal rubbed into etching paper by hand. The consistently smooth-surfaced, hard-edged, oddly ambiguous shapes in works like "In the Middle of the Night" (1982)Êor "Night Watch" (1979) would be at home in any show of up-to-the-minute painting. They seem to reflect contemporary software imaging techniques, apparently referencing an information-driven culture where the abrupt importation and seamless juxtaposition of disparate data is how you get through the day. Yet they were painted well in advance of the contemporary computer age.
"Strike" from 1975, for example, is a three-by-six foot, two-panel composition on canvas dominated by abstract forms rendered in primary colors. The airbrushed acrylic work is reminiscent of its pop-art forbears, especially James Rosenquist's billboard-derived canvases. But there are more differences than similarities between the two. Pekoc has taken Rosenquist's dismemberment of commodity-reality a step or two further. Nothing in his early paintings and drawings reads as a familiar object. Instead, Pekoc presents a cipher of interlocking shapes. And although his vocabulary is made up in large part of sensuous, even luxurious shapes and surfaces, the work doesn't seem to react to consumer culture. The subject matter is personal, dealing with relationships, hopes and fears in coded imagery that sometimes breaks down into dotted lines, letters and mathematical symbols, as in the 1976 painting inscrutably titled "Space Window CDSM12/24p."
Tregoning's installation sketches a history of Pekoc's techniques and the logic of his sensibility across a three-decade span. A narrow, waist-high plexiglass vitrine in the center of the gallery contains a sample study from the mid 1970s, salvaged from one of Pekoc's many studio drawers. It's a postcard-size model for a painting, constructed of pieces of ads cut from a magazine of the period. This sketch-collage was the first stage in a long process that involved making multiple related compositions, photographing them, projecting the resulting slides and composing works piecemeal after tracing outlines on canvas. Even relatively small paintings like those on view took weeks to complete, and large-scale projects required many months of elaborate effort. Pekoc's 20-by-40 foot mural on canvas titled "Night Sky," on permanent exhibit at the west end of the Reading Room at the Cleveland Public Library, was commissioned and installed in 1979. In terms of scale it was the most ambitious effort of that period, but as a composition, it's typical. A kind of maquette - consisting of a study for the painting itself, mounted in a large black-and-white photograph - is included in the Tregoning show and was the centerpiece of his original proposal. In the painting itself, a great pale crest rises smoke-like against a background of glowing gray, emerging from a crumpled riot of deep red and blue. Pekoc worked as a scarfer in a steel mill for a year or so. His translation of the harsh, almost demonic, power and scale of steel production into a new emotional range, using intimate quotations gleaned from the glossy urban nights where Halston and Lauren Hutton reigned, is a metaphorical triumph.
Many of the pieces in Night Visions were composed from the pages of fashion magazines - Vogue in particular. Often, Pekoc used ads for high-end luxury goods, transforming carefully sliced, anonymous commodities into fragmentary symbols. They seem neither manufactured nor natural, but like sensuous theorems - semi-abstract objects at play in a dimension of calm desire. That they seem so fresh as they enter their fourth decade is a tribute to Pekoc's deep sincerity as a lexicographer of personal truths.
Christopher Pekoc: Night VISIONs 1975Ð2000 Tregoning & Company 1300 W. 78th St. Through March 29 216.281.8626
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
CHRISTOPHER PEKOC JOINS TREGONING & COMPANY
Tregoning & Company is pleased to announce that CHRISTOPHER PEKOC – one of the most admired and honored Cleveland artists of his generation – has joined the gallery in a new partnership.
Bill Tregoning, T&Co owner and gallerist stated, “Chris’s decision to join Tregoning & Company confirms once again our commitment to the very best creative artists working in our area. Pekoc joins our roster of other mature contemporary artists of our region. We exhibit their art in one of the finest, most spacious galleries in Northern Ohio, and creatively market their works, drawing on our 35 years’ experience in the Fine Art market.”
To celebrate this important new relationship, Tregoning & Company has organized the first significant exhibition of Pekoc’s art from 1975 to 2000. CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 presents 26 seminal works of art on canvas, paper and mixed media that form the foundation of Pekoc’s continuing exploration of “the Human Condition” – deconstructed, fragmented and resurrected in remarkable new forms. “Collage and photography [here seen in fragmentary magazine images] are the root of Pekoc’s entire artistic output,” said Tregoning. “These exhibited works provide a powerful key towards understanding the work he is admired for today.”
Night has always provided Pekoc refuge from daily distractions and a quiet, still environment within which to work. Night’s mysteries and ambiguities, its romance and danger, infuse the airbrushed acrylic paintings, the pastels, the prismacolor drawings and watercolors seen together here publically for the first time in decades. Many exhibited works have received critical acclaim and multiple exhibitions.
CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 continues through Saturday 28 March 2009. A reception for the artist – including remarks by Dr. Henry Adams and the artist himself – will be held Friday 20 February 2009, from 6 to 9 pm. Ample free guarded parking is adjacent.
Tregoning & Company is in its 26th year in Cleveland. Focusing on fine art in all media from the 17th century through to the present, the gallery specializes in American Art and is noted for its extensive collection of art by artists of the Cleveland School. Its 4800 square feet of gallery space is easily the largest commercial gallery in Cleveland, located in ARTEFACTORY: The Studios of 78th Street building, at 1300 West 78th Street, in the dynamic new Detroit-Shoreway/Gordon Square Arts District. The gallery is easily reached off the end of Shoreway, just 5 minutes from downtown Cleveland and 20 minutes from both East and Western suburbs.
Bill Tregoning, T&Co owner and gallerist stated, “Chris’s decision to join Tregoning & Company confirms once again our commitment to the very best creative artists working in our area. Pekoc joins our roster of other mature contemporary artists of our region. We exhibit their art in one of the finest, most spacious galleries in Northern Ohio, and creatively market their works, drawing on our 35 years’ experience in the Fine Art market.”
To celebrate this important new relationship, Tregoning & Company has organized the first significant exhibition of Pekoc’s art from 1975 to 2000. CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 presents 26 seminal works of art on canvas, paper and mixed media that form the foundation of Pekoc’s continuing exploration of “the Human Condition” – deconstructed, fragmented and resurrected in remarkable new forms. “Collage and photography [here seen in fragmentary magazine images] are the root of Pekoc’s entire artistic output,” said Tregoning. “These exhibited works provide a powerful key towards understanding the work he is admired for today.”
Night has always provided Pekoc refuge from daily distractions and a quiet, still environment within which to work. Night’s mysteries and ambiguities, its romance and danger, infuse the airbrushed acrylic paintings, the pastels, the prismacolor drawings and watercolors seen together here publically for the first time in decades. Many exhibited works have received critical acclaim and multiple exhibitions.
CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 continues through Saturday 28 March 2009. A reception for the artist – including remarks by Dr. Henry Adams and the artist himself – will be held Friday 20 February 2009, from 6 to 9 pm. Ample free guarded parking is adjacent.
Tregoning & Company is in its 26th year in Cleveland. Focusing on fine art in all media from the 17th century through to the present, the gallery specializes in American Art and is noted for its extensive collection of art by artists of the Cleveland School. Its 4800 square feet of gallery space is easily the largest commercial gallery in Cleveland, located in ARTEFACTORY: The Studios of 78th Street building, at 1300 West 78th Street, in the dynamic new Detroit-Shoreway/Gordon Square Arts District. The gallery is easily reached off the end of Shoreway, just 5 minutes from downtown Cleveland and 20 minutes from both East and Western suburbs.
Monday, February 2, 2009
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