PATRAJDAS Contemporary at Art Chicago and NEXT

-SPONSORED POST-

PATRAJDAS Contemporary, a Chicago-based contemporary art project, will debut at both Art Chicago and the NEXT Art Fair April 29 – May 3, 2010 at the Merchandise Mart.

We’ve developed am exciting roster of wonderful talent. Our booth at Art Chicago will feature woks by artists who are established internationally, though for most, it will be their first time shown in Chicago. Alternatively, the NEXT fair is more about emerging talent, about innovation.
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 At ART CHICAGO, we will feature camouflage paintings by Konrad Winter, for whom we are the exclusive US representative.  Born in 1963, and currently working in Salzburg, Austria, Mr. Winter has been called a “Master of dazzling colors”.  1992 erhielt er ein Atelierstipendium des Cité des Arts in Paris, 1997 ein Atelierstipendium der Stadt Frankfurt am Main. Winter’s “Camouflaged Landscapes” are based on photographs, tourist brochures, travel magazines and postcards.  From a distance a realistic image is perceptible by the viewer. However, when moving closer towards the picture, the image dissolves into patches of color, into painting. This transition from perceptibility into abstraction poses questions about the content of the painting and its perception.

Paired with Mr. Winter will be selections from California artist Cheryl Ekstrom’s exceptional “Stable Inhabitants of a Changing World” sculpture series. Unmistakable, iconic objects such as the Eames Lounge & Ottoman from 1956, and the ubiquitous beanbag chairs of the 1970s are rendered in stainless steel, a material fine and sensitive enough to pick up wood grain, stitching and wear marks – the very history of the object’s interaction with humans, and render it permanent; immovable = stable.

NYC-based Bill Durgin’s contemporary “Still Life with Nudes” photo studies – thought-provoking pairings that generate emotional response. Nudes and Still Lifes is a series of paired photographs that riff on classical painting genres. Nudes: bodies contorted and reshaped into uncanny figures. Still Lives: beautifully intricate arrangements of flora and fauna. Composed to unsettle the relative size of each subject by presenting them on a similar scale, the juxtapositions of the Nudes and the Still Lifes feed off each other, reverberating between ideas of attraction and abjection.

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 NEXT Art Fair: From a curatorial perspective, our program includes artworks which communicate separate aspects of human development, and our relationship(s) to nature – both as Masters of it, and participants as biological specimens.

SangSik Hong’s figurative works exists in a nebulous intersection of sculpture and painting (he also creates large-scale installations which read as 3-dimensional paintings) from an unlikely material: drinking straws.  Educated and widely exhibited in Korea, he will make his US debut at NEXT: Contemporary symbolic sculptures & installations built from common drinking straws. A representation of Power, Sex & Desire executed in a “weak” and basic, yet iconic material.

Further emphasizing our International focus, we will also have paintings by Costa Rican artist Sofia Ruiz, whose series: “Asuntos de Familia “(Family Matters) is a profound and satirical study of individual identity, in large part rooted in her own experience as a child with an amnesia-affected mother.

Kate MacDowell’s (USA) sculptural ceramics explore the romantic ideal of union with the natural world, and conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors and borrow from myth, art history, and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.
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PATRAJDAS Contemporary celebrates creative excellence in contemporary fine art, objects and design. The gallery embraces the artist who challenges conventional expectation in concept or design yet excels in formality, technical expertise, craftsmanship, and originality

PATRAJDAS Contemporary
Chicago, IL
312-226-3444
www.patrajdas.com
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