"HONEYMOON WITH ROMEO"

22 July - 27 August 2005

Groeflin Maag Galerie is pleased to announce HONEYMOON WITH ROMEO a group show curated by New York-based artist Holly Coulis.

The works included in Honeymoon with Romeo are examples by artists who make work inspired by love: romantic love, love of painting, love of illusion and or feeling.

All of the work frames, in some way, a desire for transport, an altered experience, a romantic excursion. Though similar to traditional ideas of transcendence in art, the drift in this work is more psychological than spiritual, more engrossed than pure, and remains entangled with pop culture and the world of images. All of these artists exhibit an obvious love for their mediums. Part of the impetus for the making of the work seems to come from a need to make, a deep affinity and involvement with materials. But for the most part, the love seems more ethereal, more romantic.

Keith Mayerson's beautifully handled portrait of James Dean reads not so much as celebrity painting, but reveals an admiration, a longing for, and a personal relationship with an iconic face. Maureen Cavanaugh's lively picture of a more physical love is amplified by a series of birds diving up through a pastel sky in the background. Her illustration of emotion is expansive. Portia Hein , Benjamin Butler , and Yuko Murata have included landscapes, which are intimately crafted, and serene. There is something honest and direct presented in each of their works, a romantic poetic found in the balance between touch and subject, an interior understanding of some external world. Romantic and dark, the work presented by Bettina Sellmann , Echo Eggebrecht , and Allison Schulnik seems to draw from literature and a contemporary sense of the gothic, a melodramatic intersection of life and death. Tam Ochiai's loose and lovely drawings embody a directness and sweetness culled from his world of daydreamy imagery. Ridley Howard's touchingly painted filmic image of two diners is reminiscent of nouveau vague cinema in its stillness and love of beauty. Kiyomichi Shibuya delves into a world of quiet fantasy with an elegantly constructed piece. It stands as a romantic testament to commitment and perfection. David Humphreys "Sad Clown" is a tragic, psychological melt. His lonesome subject is a grand example of his improvisational and uncanny use of imagery. In Brad Kahlhamer's watercolor, his fluid use of paint is clear, as is his empathy for his subject. The grandiosity he emparts to his protagonists is always rich and moving. Matthew Fishers lonely soldiers contemplate, fish, cry, and exemplify unfulfilled promises of a grand male journey. They are pictures of a brokenheart and the resolve that follows. Katherine Bernhardt's rambunctious painting of a spiritually infused wild woman holds a presence of force and feminine panache. Charlotta Westergren's contemporary vanitas sits as a loving homage to painting and the enigma of nature. The dead rabbit floating in a sea of green and ocean life is a sad and jewel like depiction of mortality and life. Kurt Kaupers drawing of the famous hockey player Bobby Orr as a tragic symbol of masculine perfection blurs the longing to have and the longing to be and hints at a nostalgia for a more innocent understanding of adult masculinity.

Text by Holly Coulis

Please contact Claudia Groeflin or Davia Maag for further information or press material. Tel. +41 61 331 66 44 / Mail: galerie@groeflinmaag.com

The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday from 2-6 pm and Saturday from 2-5 pm or by appointment.