Andre Zarre Gallery is pleased to present two solo shows by contemporary abstract painters:
Arlan Huang and Rhia Hurt. Each artist’s new body of work, is featured in each of the two main exhibition rooms of the gallery. Huang’s paintings have evolved over the years into a meditative practice where beauty is revealed at the edge of the painting’s possible destruction or dissolution. Brush marks in the forms of lines, dashes, and dots are layered until the right equation of visible and obscured form is achieved. Huang’s abstract paintings aim to capture what Allen Ginsberg called, “The dearness of the vanishing moment.” Hurt’s paintings combine the tradition of color field painting with invented shapes and an unorthodox approach to materials. Hurt makes stretched canvases formed over wire that are hand-sewn, and then submerged in pools of mixed paint color. Hurt’s innovative approach results in surprising visceral forms, compositions, and cromatic shifts that seem to emerge from unconcious territories. The non-traditional and anti-easel processes defy concepts of control, conventions, and expectation in painting.
Huang finds meaning and memories in atmospheric and spatially dissolving compositions. His paintings challenge a concrete understanding of their fleeting formal structures. Hurt creates relational and autonomous forms that connect to the viewer’s physical body, while breaking the mold of painting’s rectilinear support. Huang and Hurt have their art studios in Brooklyn, NY.
Arlan Huang was born in Bangor, Maine, USA in 1948. He grew up in San Francisco, California. He currently lives in Manhattan. He is a painter and glassblower with permanent glass installations in New York, San Francisco and Japan. Recent accolades include: Joan Mitchell Creating a Living Legacy(CALL) award, 2014; Artist-in-Residence in the grounds of Zenkoji Temple, air-zenkouji.com, Japan, 2015; interviewed by Robin Clark (SFMOMA) for the CALL/VoCA talk series.
Rhia Hurt is a fine artist currently based in New York City. She received her MFA in Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and has since shown her artwork in California, New York, Berlin, and Toronto. Her work is in private collections throughout the United States. In addition to her studio art practice, Hurt is also the Executive Director of Brooklyn Art Space & Trestle Gallery, an arts organization in Brooklyn, NY.