World history, for the most part, has been written by victors in conflicts. Today, Europe faces a very difficult time due to unnecessary aggression. This exhibit, “Art for Homes!”, is a bold statement by seven artists, expressing their faith in the triumph of beauty and goodness, harbored in human DNA, wherein artists come to terms with universal feelings passed down throughout the centuries.
Basha Maryanska is a Polish artist who curates and participates in the new group exhibition of seven international artists, entitled “Art for Homes!” premiering March at Jadite Gallery on Tenth Avenue. It is a show of strongly emotive works having diverse artistic expressions.
Many of the exhibit’s participants have lived in Eastern Europe and are familiar with the enforcement of authoritarianism. These artists make bold individualistic art to counteract instances of institutional control, the curator carefully selecting work to underscore personal freedom in pieces that can be beautifully displayed at home.
Ilona Wojciechowska, a practicing artist and teacher, trained in Poland and living in the US, brings optical art to the viewer in stalwart forms. One piece presents a geometrical pillar standing firmly in the background as a blue thrust of ovoid shapes layers over it, like mirror images of flocks of birds. Complementary colors create a sense of compositional unity, the pillar, recalling a strong tower, the symbolic birds winging as intimations of nature enfolding and protecting our man-made concrete and steel with natural presence that is stronger than human constructs.
Krystyna Malinowska is a working artist living in Kraków, Poland who describes her painted images as the “sphere of virtual beings,” remembrances and comments by women on their experiences with men. Her depictions of women’s legs crossed in provocative stockings and high heels with knees touched by men’s hands, implies women constrained by men’s desires. The psychedelic and mesmerizing backgrounds are in stark and dizzying contrast to the black and white somewhat sinister austereness of the women’s posed anatomy as fetishistic statements about women’s depersonalization.
Virginia Donovan is an international artist whose home is the Hudson Valley. She is a former IBM employee where her analytical skills helped define her abstract-expressionist canvases as powerful and elegant. Her cold wax and oil pieces manifest the human life force, particularly in the painting, Presence, where a
triumphant anthropomorphic form rises from whitened paint application as a testament that the strong human spirit prevails over the surrounding dark shackles, announcing the immutable life spirit inhabiting our dreams and realities.
Anna Pietruszka’s paintings express a contrast of energies. Her painterly exploration of the human soul is to heal wounds of spiritual rupture through artwork. Expansive blues are peaceful underpaintings, with pigment overlays with dashes of encroaching color, providing intellectual artistic choices to temper the fierce tensions. This ability to bring opposing movements to cohesive and satisfying completions is found throughout her artistic communications.
Sylvia Maria Gortz is a mixed media artist working in Florida. A gallery owner and former president of AGOSA in St. Augustine, her inspiration as an artist has been from many prominent twentieth century painters. Her pieces depict bold abstract forms suspended in space, subtly contrasting with line gesture drawings of realistic objects, such as fruit, so there is pictorial tension between the abstract forms and the delicate lines hiding within the compositions. Her recent works are expressions of emotional reactions to the long duration of the pandemic.
Neela Pushparaj returns to her love of flowers here, depicting the rose almost
abstractly, as the emblem of love for the world. The rose symbolizes very powerful human emotions about love in its many aspects that the painter renders in a variety of colors. The artist abstracts her flowers, almost in the style of O’Keeffe’s blossoms where the essence of the flower is revealed. The painter’s lovely red rose of St. George shows good’s triumph in the world.
Basha Maryanska’s mixed media pieces are her own personal explorations of attempts to integrate strong emotions through brilliant chroma. Her abstract expressionist works, particularly Brainstorming and Divided Mind are explosive
ejections of energy from the painter’s psyche, conveying the difficult times of the pandemic, politics and illness this artist has endured.
Home is a place of safety and comfort where sleep can soften in feathered down beds. This exhibit by seven accomplished international artists, entices viewers to feel emotional satisfactions so the experience of home can be one of pleasurable contentment.
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