Sandra Sheehy
Untitled, 2006
Cotton, wool, paper and beads
45 x 8 x 2.25 inches / 114.3 x 20.3 x 5.7 cm / SSe 49
SEPTEMBER 14 - OCTOBER 21, 2006
We are pleased to announce with this exhibition the gallery’s relocation to 210 Eleventh Avenue. Where We Come From highlights some of the contemporary living artists represented by the gallery throughout the last 25 years. Our scope is focused on those who exemplify Neuve Invention (Fresh Invention), a term coined by Jean Dubuffet to describe artists who are self-taught—without art education and without art historical references in their work, but are more sophisticated than art brut artists. These seven selected artists include Gregory Van Maanen, the artist longest represented by the gallery, whose painting is an on-going practice to forgive the violence of Viet Nam, where he was wounded; Kevin Sampson, whose accretive found object sculptures chronicle his Newark neighborhood, English artist Sandra Sheehy, whose densely stitched and embroidered, collaged and painted works are inspired by nature in its variegated beauty and decay. Montana-based artist Keith Goodhart has begun incising personal glyphs into the wood of his ever-evolving sculptures adding variety and pattern to their surfaces. Swiss artist Christine Sefolosha works in ink and tar, mediums that translate her morphing dreamscapes, and British artist Chris Hipkiss who continues to investigate our beleaguered ecology often defended by his androgynous warriors in graphite and silver ink. Mort Golub, the newest gallery artist in this exhibition, meticulously collects found objects until he understands how their weathered surfaces and unusual shapes best illuminate the sinuous forms they later become.
We are also pleased to present the opening of our Contemporary Ceramics and Tribal Room where we will be showing the gallery collection of Contemporary Studio Ceramics including artists from the United States, Japan and Australia. We will continue to show tribal textiles, as well as African, Pre-Columbian, South East Asian and Neolithic Asian art. This is a fast-growing department of the gallery.