Please join us on Sunday, October 23, at 3pm for an artist talk led by Paton Miller with artists Irina Alimanestinau & Brian O'Leary regarding their current exhibition SHIFTS. SHIFTS is a two-person exhibition with Irina Alimanestianu and Brian O’Leary, examining their distinct progressions from representation to abstraction and looping back again.
Alimanestianu's paintings span from 1998, when she had young children and centered her work on social constructs and archetypes, examining her relationship to them. She is currently focused on her connection to nature, matter, and energy in the universe. “I’ve always felt that the organic world has its own agency, its own consciousness, and I wanted to paint that. I mean paint intuitively in a language of mark making, colors, and shapes.” Recently, we are seeing more representational elements that
Alimanestianu is weaving into her abstractions; she is putting humans back into the whirlwind of nature’s ever-changing forms.
O’Leary has described the painting process as “waiting for something to happen that I wouldn’t have thought of making.”
O’Leary began his career creating detailed realist works on paper with colored pencil. Though successful with these, he felt a sense of stagnancy and in a fit of artistic frustration one night, doused the works in high gloss black paint completely obliterating them. Rather than seeing them as ruined and discarding them, he found the process freeing and discovered he was able to begin to paint without constraint.O’Leary still continues with that process today. A dynamic painter, he rotates the canvas throughout the painting process to ensure there is no horizon line, no sense of gravity, no landscape. The paintings read as abstractions, and yet in recent work there is the subtle encroachment of figuration. The results are richly layered paintings full of energy and expression.
Please join us for a Q & A talk with both artists, led by Paton Miller, on Sunday, October
23, at 3pm.
