May Issue 2001
Tippy Stern Fine Art in Charleston, SC, Features an Exhibition of Paintings
Artists Richard Hagerty, Don Nice, and Arn Strasser will be exhibiting their work at Tippy Stern Fine Art LLC, in Charleston, SC, in a show entitled Paintings, which opens May 26 and continues through July 26, 2001. The show reveals and honors painting as the language of the unconscious.
Richard Hagerty, whose work recalls Dali, Bosch, Kandinsky, Miro, and Chagall, was influenced by the symbolic art movement preceding WWII. He has been a working artist for over 25 years. A Charlestonian, Hagerty is a visionary of the city's art scene. His work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast. For this exhibition, hagerty has expanded his canvases and our imaginations in his newest body of work, entitled Trilogy, a series of three large oil on canvas paintings. These works are based on the artist's personal myth experiences and their connection to the collective unconscious. Hagerty explains, "As an artist, I'm not so much interested in the interpretation of dreams as I am in taking the visual journey they open to us." The artist lures the viewer into the work, to be captured with movement, color and story.
Don Nice, who has been described as a "realist with an edge," is a Californian now living outside of New York City on the Hudson River. A working artist for over 40 years, Nice is represented by some of the foremost galleries and collections in the country. Nice's early mentors ran the gamut of movements during the heady times of the late 50's and early 60's, including Kokoscha, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and Gorky. Nice and Pollock share an obsession with the totem as an avenue to the preconscious sources of primal creative energy. Nice paints by a process of allowing this energy to reveal itself through him. His works often grow from the bottom up, elaborating itself in an organic process where color, shape, and movement happened spontaneously. Natural elements are lifted from their context and placed, along with mundane objects of civilization, in a structured, compartmentalized framework. The effect is a cultivated incongruity. There is no hidden meaning, but rather a challenge to us to see things in a fresh way. Inspired by the beauty of the Lowcountry, Nice has done some new work relating to Charleston for the exhibition. Nice was in the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery last June, entitled "In the Shadow of the Flag".
Arn Strasser moved to Charleston a year ago. He has maintained a working studio for more than 20 years. He brings to his paintings his training as an architect. The body of work in the exhibition explores ambiguous spaces and the mysterious objects contained within. There are broad fields of color, with simplicity of line and form, punctuated by uncertain objects whose relations to the whole are not immediately decipherable. Strasser wants viewers to question the process of seeing as knowing by providing concrete images which are difficult to understand. Confronted with the inability to make sense of the work, the viewer relaxes into just seeing. Thus Strasser hopes to induce in the viewer a sense of seeing freshly and with pleasure, as a painter in the act of painting. "Arrival," a piece in the exhibition, is an abstract, expressionistic piece that portrays the experience of living in a new city and near to the colorful sub-tropical landscape of coastal South Carolina.
Ongoing exhibitions by gallery artists Juan Logan, Susan Page, Brian Rutenberg, Phil Garrett, and Allan Wendt are also on view in the gallery.
For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 843/534-0028, e-mail at (tippyb@earthlink.net) or on the web at (http://www.tippysternfineart.com).
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