| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
March Issue 2009
Jerald Melberg
Gallery in Charlotte, NC, Offers Works by Brian Rutenberg
Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, NC, will present the exhibit, Tidesong, featuring works by Brian Rutenberg, on view from Mar. 14 through May 9, 2009.
Jerald Melberg Gallery is honored to present its fourth solo exhibition of new paintings by Brian Rutenberg. Tidesong, an exhibition which includes both paintings and works on paper, is a new body of work that continues to explore the artist's fascination with the landscape and quality of light of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Rutenberg says, "My imagination was in large part formed by my childhood experience growing up in the Lowcountry of South Carolina from Myrtle Beach down to Charleston and to this day I still use that sense of light and that geography as kind of a springboard, as a starting point for the work even though the work does not end up being about the Lowcountry or anything down there. There's a certain kind of light down there when you're around a lot of water. It's like a silvery, blue light that permeates everything. It can be melancholic. It can be joyful. It can be many, many different facets, and I try to get that feeling of light."
The artist reflects on his new work: "I believe that the eye that is not told what to see, sees more. I like to think of abstraction as a process, as a verb, and not as a style. To abstract means to remove, it is a process that condenses experience down into complex arrangements of color and surface, not to recreate what we see but create something we haven't seen. These paintings are not at all specific. If you can capture a sense of place and a mood and a light without rendering trees and moss and all that stuff, I think you can go much deeper than you can with what's seen. You can capture something much richer and more complex."
A South Carolina native,
Rutenberg received a BFA from the College of Charleston and an
MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Since 1985
Rutenberg has been honored with over 100 gallery and museum exhibitions
across the United States, including a retrospective in 2006 at
the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, SC.
For further info check our NC Commercial Gallery listings,
call the gallery at 704/365-3000 or visit (www.jeraldmelberg.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2009 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2009 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.