The Silvermine Arts Center is the place to visit this summer. The Sculpture Walk is full of Carole Eisner’s brightly colored painted-steel sculptures, and the new gallery exhibitions will open in August. Stroll the 5-acre campus or attend the opening reception on Sunday, August 2nd for these new shows, all of which chart the theme of abundance in all its quicksilver complexity. Small things become vast worlds, and vast worlds reveal their interior light. With one of the exhibitions, “Worlds Without End,” we introduce our new collaboration with the New York-based Brian Morris Gallery and Buddy Warren Inc.
“Worlds Without End”
In the first collaborative exhibition between the Silvermine Arts Center and the Brian Morris Gallery and Buddy Warren Inc., the Silvermine Galleries will present works of organic abundance, many of which explore the territory between figurative and landscape narrative. The exhibition debuted at the Brian Morris Gallery’s Chrystie Street location in New York City in June and opens at Silvermine in an expanded version on August 2nd. The artists featured in the exhibition include Julie Heffernan, whose magical, flamboyant complexity has refreshed the contemporary view of figure and landscape, David Ambrose, Teresa Braun, Charles Geiger, Brent Green, Sharon Horvath, Ruth Marten, Ronnie Rysz, Gerald Saladyga, Lisa Sanditz, Kyle Staver, and Robert Taplin. Paintings, video installation, and mixed media works all lend their particular voices to “Worlds Without End.” Beautiful and haunting, full of hopefulness and foreboding, the show has a sense of humor, history, public and private mythologies, and stark warnings of dystopia. It speaks to our present-day dilemmas.
Victor Pesce
Artist and critic Mario Naves has written of Victor Pesce: “He paints pictures of simple things, but the pictures he paints are not so simple.” The subjects of Pesce’s still-life paintings are singular objects—bottles, vases, boxes, plates. They are set against mottled expanses of color that can represent horizon and surface. His objects occupy space—they sit, they have gravitas, they ask us to stop and look. The paintings are small, but the scale is both intimate and vast. Pesce creates an atmospheric richness that belies the simple geometries of his objects. His objects are subjects, and they walk their own quiet line of abstraction and representation.
Pesce was born to Italian immigrant parents in Flushing, Queens, in 1938. He died in 2010. He took his first art classes while waiting for an Army posting in Europe. When he returned to the U.S., he joined the family business as a licensed plumber, but soon afterward enrolled at NYU to pursue an art-education degree. A course with abstract expressionist Milton Resnick strongly influenced his early work. Paintings for this exhibit were chosen in consultation with the Elizabeth Harris Gallery.
“Carole Eisner/Painted Sculpture”
The Silvermine Arts Center is delighted to announce a special exhibit of outdoor steel sculptures by Carole Eisner. The exhibit will complement Silvermine’s Sculpture Walk. Her work will be celebrated at the official August 2nd opening of the late summer exhibits, but the sculptures will be in place for the public to enjoy beginning in late June. They will remain in place on Silvermine’s five-acre campus through October. In a collaboration with the Town of Wilton, one of her sculptures, “Konnected,” appears on River Road across from the Stop & Shop shopping plaza.
Eisner’s installation will include new works—all abstract, welded-steel structures painted with high-gloss auto paint, a departure from the rusted-metal patinas and polished-steel finishes she has used in the past.
Eisner, who earned her B.F.A. at Syracuse University (where she was the recipient of the George Arents Award) and studied at the International School of Photography in New York City, has exhibited in Brussels, New York, Tokyo, Miami, Sarasota, Art Basel (Miami), and London. Her permanent installation sites in Norwalk include Veterans Park, Cranbury Park, Norwalk City Hall, 50 Washington Street, and Heritage Park. Both the Silvermine Arts Center and the Westport Library feature her work. Her sculpture is in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum as well as many corporate collections including Knoll International, the iconic modern furniture design company.
“The focus of my work has always been public art,” says Eisner. “My sculptures are monumental, abstract and made to last. I work in steel because of its strength, permanence and indestructibility. As a sculptor I’m concerned with form, line, space and balance. I strive to make the sculptures appear gestural, light, airy and whimsical to belie the heavy industrial quality of the material.”
Silvermine Arts Center is one of the oldest artist communities in the United States. Its fiveacre campus in New Canaan, Connecticut, consists of a nationally renowned artist guild, an award-winning school of art offering classes for all ages, an arts and fine crafts shop, and a gallery offering over twenty contemporary and historic exhibitions annually. Silvermine is a non-profit organization that also offers an educational outreach program, Art Partners, and hosts lectures, performances, film screenings, and special events.
Gallery Hours: Silvermine Galleries are open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (203) 9669700 ext. 22 or visit the website: www.silvermineart.org.
1037 Silvermine Road New Canaan, CT 06840 (203) 966-9700.