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September Issue
2009
Somerhill Gallery
in Durham, NC, Features Works by Jason Craighead and Donald Gialanella
Somerhill Gallery in Durham, NC, is presenting an exhibit of recent works on canvas, panels and paper by Jason Craighead, as well as sculptural pieces by Donald Gialanella, on view through Oct. 2, 2009.
Jason Craighead
A resident of downtown Raleigh, NC, Jason Craighead is a recognized leader in the North Carolina art scene. His work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the Southeastern United States. He grew up in Florida where he studied art at Gulf Coast Community College and Florida State University. He has received numerous awards and served as a juror for various art shows. Craighead has been selected as Signature Artist for charitable art auctions, and his work has been featured in a number of publications, including Artists & Art Galleries of the Southeast.
"I am struck by Jason's ways of simplifying or magnifying a thought or an experience into comprehensible, imaginable form", said Joseph Rowand, Director of Somerhill Gallery. "With line, emerging forms, and juicy painterly passages on canvas, Jason does what a gifted artist is supposed to make us do. And that is to stop us to better ponder what we might not otherwise."
Donald Gialanella
Donald Gialanella studied in New York City at The Cooper Union under Louise Bourgeois, Jim Dine, Vito Acconci and Hans Haacke. The school's traditional apprenticeship programs exposed him to bronze casting, steel fabrication, painting, drawing and graphic design, while classes with conceptualists Vito Acconci and Hans Haacke introduced him to anti-academic and revolutionary aesthetics. After graduating in 1979 and being awarded the Elliot Lash Prize in recognition of his monumental wood and steel tripods exhibited in Cooper Park, Gialanella was asked by Bourgeois to work as her assistant.
Employing a variation of the repousse technique used by the Turkish craftsmen Gialanella came to know through his time in Turkey as a professor at Bilkent University, he developed a flexible and interactive process to construct steel sculpture. The raw cut pieces are dimensionally transformed through bending and hammering in the same way a carver shapes his stone, one blow at a time. Gialanella then welds them together in a seemingly random way allowing him complete freedom to add and subtract in order to achieve the desired mass and attitude.
Gialanella has exhibited in sculpture parks, public spaces, museums and galleries. His work is met with enthusiasm and cherished by private collectors who have commissioned and procured pieces for their homes and collections throughout the United States and around the world. Personalities as diverse as Uri Geller, Howard Stern, Angelina Jolie, and Jimmy Buffet own Gialanella sculptures. He has been represented by Somerhill Gallery since 1998.
For further information
check our NC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at
919/688-8868 or visit (www.somerhill.com).
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