October Issue 1999
Hidell Brooks Gallery Features Works by Brian Rutenberg
Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, NC, is pleased to announce their first solo exhibition for Brian Rutenberg entitled Clear Blue Sky. The show will run through Oct. 16.
Brian Rutenberg was born in Myrtle Beach, SC, in 1965 and now resides in New York City. Over thirty new works, including oil on canvas and oil & pencil on paper, are represented in this exhibition. Rutenberg has established a reputation as one of the best abstract painters working today. Rutenberg says" the common thread running through all of my paintings and drawings is the subject of water which inspires everything, from the rhythm and density with which I apply my pigment to the titles." Yet Rutenberg's paintings are not landscapes. They are abstractions created from his internal assimilation of the waters around which he grew up. These paintings are as much about visual beauty as they are about the emotions and senses that are roused when one thinks of water. According to Rutenberg, " I am less interested in the image of water than the thought of water." Water, to Rutenberg, implies redemption, suffocation, transparency and complacency. His work evokes light and space that centers on water, but Rutenberg's aquatic work is conceptual--a metaphor for painting itself.
Rutenberg has taken his water imagery to new depths by incorporating a new form of an oval or ring shape into the current body of work. He explains that " the motif was derived from the image of dipping ones face into a pool of water, cresting a ring shape around the face; a line between the outside world and the liquid world of private imagination, between visible and invisible."
Rutenberg received his BFA from the College of Charleston in 1987 and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1997, he was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Fellowship spending six months in Dublin, Ireland. Rutenberg has works in the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, Greenville County Museum of Art, SC, and St. John's Museum of Art, Wilmington, NC, and has an upcoming 10 year retrospective at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH.
Hidell Brooks Gallery specializes in contemporary art which includes paintings, prints and sculpture.
For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 704/334-7302.
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