Holly Coulis, Jackie Gendel, Pamela Jorden, Yoora Lee

Philip Martin Gallery is pleased to present, Holly Coulis, Jackie Gendel, Pamela Jorden, Yoora Lee, a four-artist exhibition exploring paintings and how they come together, especially with regard to time, sensory experience, and identity. In their respective bodies of work, Holly Coulis, Jackie Gendel, Pamela Jorden and Yoora Lee examine paintings, how they work, how they are read, and what they mean as artistic and cultural objects.

The creation of pictorial experience is at the heart of Holly Coulis's work. Lines cross her paintings in specifically plastic ways: taking direction, dividing up areas, circumscribing forms. Working from initial sketches, Coulis creates space though brushy lines and defined areas of applied paint, each outlined in color. The result is abstraction intersecting with the odd still life object – most often citrus. These forms act as spatial agents in a picture plane, rather than as substitutes for bodies in physical space.

Jackie Gendel’s works engage texture, line, color and form to create alluring, narrative moments. Individual figures in Gendel's work play off groupings; people exist in pictorial spaces, drawn as if pulled through dance or theatrical design. Much of her recent work makes contradictory use of two of modernity’s most common conventions of image production: serial repetition of form and the sequential image of narrative. She employs both, using them simultaneously to unfold the implied relationship between narrative time and painterly process.

Pamela Jorden applies her paint in directed, pushed and dragged flows. She actively and physically manipulates the material of her work. The linen is pulled, stretched, and incised. It wraps around the convex and concave curves of the stretchers, and gives solidity to the more atmospheric qualities of the painted surface.

Painter and film fanatic Yoora Lee, "watches movies before starting a new work, evoking the on-screen 'moving image' through delicate horizontal brushstrokes," critic Elfie Thomas writes, going on to say that Lee, "paints memories and emotions as if she were viewing them at a 'movie theater' – 'a drama with evocative music and melancholic colors.' Later, she’ll make copious sketches before settling on a composition and then articulating it in oil paint, using her unique style of horizontal strokes to compose forms. Through this delicate layering of thin oil paint, her artworks seem to tremble with momentum, 'like a video on a TV screen.'"