Saturday, February 4, 2012

I am delighted with all the buzz and excitement for our current exhibit, My Hero, featuring Superheroes in Contemporary Art.

One of our featured artists is Houston artist, Mitch McGee.   Mitch McGee’s artwork lives between painting and sculpture.   I wanted to share the process he goes through to create his current series of Birch (wood) artwork.



The first step is creating the illustration, digitizing it, parsing it out layer by layer and printing it out to size.









Each layer of birch is then hand cut









 




Then layer by layer the artwork is sanded, stained, glued and brought together to create the final dimensional artwork.



On average, it takes Mitch about 30-40 hours to create each piece.


However, the piece we have in our current exhibit, The Avengers, took 50!


Mitch and I recently appeared on cable TV's "Open with Rhina Valentin" on January 27th.  You can see and hear Mitch talk about his work. 
And I talk about the show, My Hero, on exhibit through March 31st , 2012.






After the show, we were photographed with Open Host, Rhina Valentin:


And the group behind the scenes who brings it all together including Shirley Arrieta, Dalia Gonzalez, Angel Ramos are captured here with Rhina and I
 I loved that they all wore their favorite Superheroes shirts in honor of our exhibit!









Friday, February 3, 2012

Superheroes in Contemporary Art

The inspiration for the current exhibit at my gallery, Elisa Contemporary Art, began about 2 years ago when I first viewed the artwork of Don Morris.  

Don's brightly colored and undulating canvases caught my attention.  I loved the color and movement of each canvas.













Then, as I started to move closer, I saw figures and words and learned that the interplay of colors and textures were created with comic books!

Upon closer examination...


each canvas comes to life with comic book superheroes who fly, struggle, and climb before us in small fragments and vignettes. 

Words bubble from the comic book text and are clearly visible throughout the pieces, so the viewer can read the stories of our action heroes.  

Don's series, “Our Heroes” was inspired by the Pop Art of the 60’s.  Don recently had a solo exhibit at the Michael Lord Gallery in Palm Springs.  

We are thrilled to have him part of My Hero, on exhibit at Elisa Contemporary Art, 5622 Mosholu Avenue, Riverdale NY through March 31, 2012.