Navigating Abstraction

Vicky Colombet

Clytie Alexander

Jian-Jun Zhang

Barbara Edelstein

Lucia Papčo

Christian Duvernois Gallery is extremely pleased to present a summer group exhibition titled Navigating Abstraction.

Through their highly accomplished practices, the artists in the exhibition investigate various approaches to utilizing abstract tendencies in the media of painting, printing, photography and sculpture. Their respective poetics are grounded in the history of abstract art from both the West and the East, merging traditional and contemporary materials and topics into compositions that are captivating both visually and conceptually.

The paintings of Vicky Colombet are simultaneously abstract and suggestive of landscape. Made with natural gem and earth pigments, they are both earthbound and transcendent. The movement is upward, underlining the depicted majestic rocky terrains and mountainy vistas, in the artist’s original rendering of these traditional artistic motifs. Mostly monochromatic, the paintings of Colombet lend themselves to contemplation and reflection.

Lucia Papčo’s inspiration stems from landscapes of her native Slovakia. By using black and white photography and avoiding digital manipulation, the artist captures ephemeral moments of the interplay of light, angle and shadow, resulting in unique portrayals of the landscape. By underexposing the photographs and transforming a colored reality into a monochromatic image, Papčo evokes a sense of abstraction from the physical environment while delivering dreamy and sublime, emotionally charged imagery of a place.

Clytie Alexander’s Variable Edition series of unique stencil prints are made on both sides of transparent, handmade paper. Conceived as a set of abstract notations (a constantly present principle in Alexander’s work), these works playfully merge the artist’s preoccupations with color, transparent surfaces, their edges and boundaries, foreground and background, surface and depth, light and shadow, motion and stillness and continuity and dissonance. Alexander’s works seem like they reach out to the surrounding space, inviting the spectator for a complex and nuanced visual experience.

In his works in various media, Chinese artist Jian-Jun Zhang references traditional Chinese landscape and ink painting as much as Western abstraction art history. By using ink, oil paint, acrylic, natural materials and rice or translucent papers, he poetically speaks about space, time, cultural legacies and environment. Zhang’s contemplative compositions, graciously occupying the space between figuration and abstraction, embody uncertainty and emphasize the process of transformation.

Barbara Edelstein expresses the importance of integrating nature into our everyday lives in order to preserve it. Her series of diptychs pair photography and ink drawings; various artistic processes that evoke an array of contrasts such as permanence and impermanence, East and West, or hard and soft. Ultimately, this dynamics impart the artist’s sense of quiet reverence for nature, while also provoking thinking about our own relation to it, as an individual and as a society.

The Christian Duvernois Gallery exhibits works by a group of international artists who explore themes relating to landscape and the environment in a variety of mediums, as well as abstract tendencies in contemporary art.

Serving as a laboratory for large-scale museum exhibitions, Christian Duvernois Gallery examines various perspectives of art and historical context – presenting not only contemporary pieces, but also prominent work from the European Post-War abstraction movement.

Born in Paris, Christian Duvernois has distinguished himself as a gallery owner, landscape designer, and lecturer. In 1981, Christian moved from Paris to New York City and opened an art gallery on Madison Avenue called Façade. Well-known by art circles in both New York and Europe, Façade specialized in classical and contemporary architectural and landscape design. The gallery featured paintings, sculptures, photographs, and architectural drawings that explored the various aspects of man’s relationship with his natural environment.

Since 2001, Christian has operated a landscape design studio specializing in high-end residential gardens, while remaining active as a private dealer of works of art related to landscape and nature. In 2008 he published a book, Marie Antoinette and the Last Garden of Versailles, and is currently researching for a book on the Kitchen Garden at Versailles.

Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, Curatorial Advisor, has served as curator at the Sculpture Department and head of 19th century sculpture at the Louvre Museum since 1979. She has been involved in major exhibitions at the Louvre and at prominent institutions such as the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Forbidden City, Beijing, the National Palace Museum, Taipei, and the State Historical Museum, Moscow.

Zeljka Himbele Kozul, Gallery Director, has been working with contemporary art for numerous years. She is a graduate of the prestigious Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, US. She held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Also, she curated exhibitions at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY; Big Medium Gallery, Austin, TX; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Program, Long Island City, NY; Cuchifritos, New York, NY; Occurrence, Montreal, Canada; and Karlin Studios, Prague, Czech Republic, among many others.