Thursday, October 13th 6-9 pm

Skylight Gallery NYC Presents Aqua Firma

Fantasies born of water and earth collide at Skylight Gallery in Chelsea

Aqua Firma -2 person show featuring -

Carla Goldberg
(Cold Spring, NY), mixed-media panels featuring resin on plexi

Elisa Priztker
(New York City, NY), photography (of in situ installations) and digital media

With Aqua Firma Skylight continues its series of visual “conversations” between two artists. Carla Goldberg and Elisa Priztker derive their inspiration from the natural world but take their work to a decidedly unearthly place, capturing light on water and overlaying human conventions onto landscapes and tree trunks to humorous and profound effect.

Carla Goldberg & Elisa Pritzker
Artists in Conversation at Skylight Gallery NYC

Exhibition runs from October 10th thru November 12th

About Us

Skylight Gallery shows work by mostly New York State Artists and a little beyond the borders. Our series of exhibitions this season features a conversation of artworks between artists based in the Hudson Valley and artists based in Manhattan and the boroughs. Typically the artists we exhibit have developed and honed their visual voice, having studied and made art for decades. Occasionally, we show exceptional young talent whose work is mature beyond their years.

Skylight Gallery also has a sister gallery relationship with Kunstleben Berlin gallery and does at least one international show featuring the artists of Kunstleben. Skylight also conducts an open call once a year. We believe in giving talented artists the opportunity to show in Manhattan.

Gallery hours
(Monday through Friday 10am through 4pm variable) Saturdays 12-5

The gallery is located at 538 W 29th St. NY, NY 10001.

Please direct inquiries or requests for information to Gallery Director Carla Goldberg at 646-772-2407, or

email at info@skylightgallerynyc.com

&

In Skylight Gallery’s viewing space

in his first Solo exhibition in NY

Roger Derrick: “In Similar Fashion”

&
Peter Bocour

This summer exhibition is not one to pass by.

July 25th to Aug. 26th

Opening Reception This Thursday evening August 4th from 6-9 pm

Skylight Gallery NYC

538 West 29th Street

New York, NY

Group show featuring German artists  Romy Campe (Berlin) Heinz ‘HEGO’ Gövert (Herdecke) Michaela Günther (Gelsenkirchen) Manfred Holtkamp (Wetter) Dr. Jorge-Luis Maeso-Madronero (Witten) Dagmar Oeser (Unna) Maria Pitseleh (native German, currently living in Barcelona)

The show is a broad survey of various artists creating contemporary visual art throughout Germany, both in major art centers like Berlin as well as smaller hotspots located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. This corresponds to the gallery’s domestic agenda, which pairs New York City artists with established New York State regional artists, mostly from the art-rich Hudson Valley region, in two person shows.  The visual conversation that ensues between urban and rural artists has become the exciting hallmark that has made previous Skylight shows such a success, and Gallery Director Carla Goldberg believes that the conversation among the various German artists in the gestalt show bring a similar dynamic to the table. “We are always interested here in the artists themselves, in addition to their work; how they came to this place in their creative careers, and how they are influenced both by place and by other artists,” says Goldberg. “In Germany, even more of the general population makes creating serious art part of their daily practice, regardless of their aspirations or day jobs, much like Americans might garden, cook or craft. I believe this phenomenon is an interesting clue to the contemporary German character, and might lead us to more closely examine how art is viewed through American eyes, as something that only ‘certain people’ pursue.  What does that say about us, and what does that say about them?” The show covers a variety of work from figurative to lyric abstraction and even art that blurs the boundaries between visual art and performance, utilizing human bodies as the canvas.
	Romy Campe creates multimedia pieces on wood panels that focus on extreme close-ups of the human face, mostly caught in mid strong expression. Her intent is to capture through these almost unnervingly intimate views of her subjects the mental and emotional energy that defines the human condition; the strictly human ability to create new worlds, ideas and futures through our own minds, both blocking and releasing the energy that exists in nature and that our reactions transform.
Lyric Abstractionists Heinz ‘HEGO’ Gövert, Michaela Günther and Dagmar Oeser each explore the canvas plane through creating a pictorial structure that juxtaposes color relationships and spatial tensions in their multimedia works.
	HEGO a former rock and blues drummer of note, continues his musical exploration of emotion and mood in his pieces, “riffing” on such topical subjects as the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, friends from Libya arrested prior to the uprising, and his own series of recent heart attacks. His paintings feature pure and bright acid tones, or as he calls them “screaming colors”, piercing a normally darker or more murky ground.
	Michaela Güntherpieces harken back to her experience as a chemist, colors undifferentiated between each other, mingling but unmixed. She seeks in her work to capture the secrets of time and transience.
	Dagmar Oeser turns her ideas, or “inner pictures”, into open dialogues with the viewer, her wispy pinks and blues pulled down to earth and made somber and foreboding through dark, stacked shaped background forms.
	Dr. Jorge-Luis Maeso-Madronero explores the power of color in his abstract work, but is more drawn to monochromes and the richness and depth found within a single bold color field, his textures sometimes taking on an almost raku-like effect.
	Manfred Holtkampwood panels and sculptures play on the natural properties of each of the various woods he chooses, augmented by both his structural treatment of each piece and his adding of an artificial “grain” of paint, ash, acid or other media as a counterpoint to the natural pattern of that particular type of wood itself.  The qualities of each piece become a response to the call of the material in front of him.
	Maria Pitseleh leaves the canvas entirely, choosing instead to create her fantasy worlds by painting on the naked human form (shown photographically in this show), her models’ movement through pose, dance or expression changing the work from moment to moment, while underlining the deliberately temporary nature of her creations.

Roger Derrick In Similar Fashion   Previewing works from his most recent series, In Similar Fashion includes both traditional mixed media works on paper, as well as select paintings in oil. Roger Derrick’s distinct style reveals evidence of trained illustrative procedures, fused with the fine art sensitivity of a true portrait artist.   While technique and hand control are clearly evident in his method, Derrick also reveals his versatility through the swift confidence in select areas of his media application. Highly inspired by fashion artists of past and present, as well as the technical aptitude of the greatest academic masters, Roger Derrick’s shoes are visually captivating at immediate glance and remain meticulous in approach. Further consideration, of these highly coveted accessories, surpasses their aesthetic quality and also elevates them into the realm of metaphorical representation.   According to Derrick, his shoe series is intended to make suggestions on multiple levels, which may be directly or subtly.  At the same time, when using them as his subjects, he enables his viewers to not only focus on their character,  but also contemplate the absence of their keeper. Currently working towards  the completion of his comprehensive series, Derrick’s progressive outlook is beyond promising.

Peter Bocour (1947-2011)     Peter Bocour died in late June of complications from a lengthy battle with leukemia.  Peter grew up in the Greenwich Village art scene of the 1950′s and 1960′s.  His father, Leonard Bocour, was the founding partner of Bocour Artists Colors.  As a child, he spent a great deal of time in his father’s paint factory, particularly enjoying the ribbons of paint emerging from the paint guns and filling oil, watercolor and acrylic tubes sold under the names Bocour, Bellini and Aquatec.  He told stories of his father giving tails of paint from the tube guns to artists such as Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the days before they were successful and receiving paintings by them in thanks.  Peter himself studied art, receiving his undergraduate degree from New York University and his MFA from the University of California at Berkeley.  He also studied painting at the Skowhegen School and at the New York Studio School.  Bocour was an abstract artist who loved to use color and hated to draw, leading to his expressive visual vocabulary.  He showed professionally from 1977 through 2008 at galleries in Chelsea and in New Jersey.

Gallery hours (Monday through Friday 10am through 4pm variable) and Saturdays 12-5



OPENING RECEPTION May 19th, 6-9pm

Skylight Gallery is thrilled to announce the opening of our latest show of 2011, displaying recent work by Encaustic Wax Artist Joyce Korotkin and Sculptor Tom Holmes. The show will be open for public viewing from Mon. May 16th- Fri June 24th, 2011.

The artists will be present for the opening reception on Thursday, May 19th, from 6-9pm.

Joyce Korotkin & Tom Holmes’ work shares a strong common thread. Natural elements inspire both artists, allowing for the media used to imitate, dance with and speak to the beauty ever present in the natural world. In both cases this beauty is enhanced by the artists’ hand in its manipulation.

Joyce’s pieces connect with the mist of our memory and the nostalgic places in our hearts while jumping off the canvas and enveloping us in a world all too familiar but ever elusive. Few wield natural elements with the grace and power that Tom Holmes does, creating a plethora of work in a great variety of natural media. Nature’s incredible intention cannot be more clearly presented than while viewing one of his pieces.

Joyce Korotkin’s Tabula Rasa Series is borne entirely of the imagination. In it she evokes real landscapes that play on the poetic moments of life infused with an incandescent light that distills the essence of memory. Steeped in the sensation of suspended time, they invite intimate reverie in much the same way that music, taste, or scent can transport one with nostalgic longing to a deeply private interior space of the past. These spaces are inevitably more deeply and truly felt than accurately reconstructed or understood in the present moment. Her paintings have the unique quality of allowing both the intensity of the foggy past and the bright reality of the present to exist at once and seamlessly. Interestingly enough, they will do so long into the future, adding the last of our described dimensions of ‘time’ to her work.

Tom Holmes’ work in wood, stone, bone, metal, and other natural elements gives him the ability to create intuitively.
All possibilities can exist briefly before he imposes parameters upon his emotional and intellectual contexts. The undercurrents of natural decay, unity, duality, symmetry, space, time and dimension are at the heart of his creative energy. These undercurrents are brought to form with a rare concreteness that expresses deep playfulness and understanding of spirit. Tom works seasonally-different seasons suggest different types and elements in his work. He loves the crisp colds of zero or below for icing in the winter. The summer brings outdoor work in steel sculpture, waterfalls and stone. Spring and fall are transition times that tie the year together with welding, sand blasting and finishing.
For Tom, there exists only the transcendence of the everyday-cooking, friends, and love become the sublime witness of doing. The process of creation is the essence of his work, but the end products are nothing to shake a stick at either.

The exhibition will run from May 16 – June 24, 2011. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am until 4pm. The gallery is located at 538 W 29th St. NY, NY 10001. For more information or inquiries, please contact Gallery Director Carla Goldberg at 646-772-2407, or via email at info@skylightgallerynyc.com.

DEEP BLUE

Recent work by

Aphrodite Navab & Lisa Zukowski

February 28-April 3, 2011

OPENING RECEPTION March 3rd, 6-9pm

Skylight Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its second brilliant show of 2011-Deep Blue, Recent work by Aphrodite Navab and Lisa Zukowski.  The show will run from February 28-April 3, 2011.  An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 3, at which the artists will be present.

Both artists use active and participatory means to accomplish healing on personal, cultural, and global levels.  Out of these practices comes art that is revelatory and much deeper than meets the eye.  Both artists take personal experience, roll it up, shred it apart and send it out to the collective conscious in the form of their transformational work.  Prominent blue in their pieces calls to mind a calm and peaceful state, and bursts with pulsing, radiating energy.  This energy of blue has an attractive, engulfing and leaves-you-wanting-for-more quality rarely present in much contemporary work.

Aphrodite Désirée Navab’s performance-based photography series: Super East-West Woman’s Sufi Dance: Egypt is motivated by her desire to humorously and compassionately critique the cultures that she embodies: Iranian and American.  She does this by using her own body to counteract the evil concept that each culture holds of the other in attempt to alleviate the vilifying energies propagated by political figures and decisions that are highly visible and powerful in the media.

Navab has morphed her chador (Farsi for Islamic covering) into a cape.  Our Western ‘Superman’ is transformed into ‘Superwoman’ with a fabulous Islamic cape of agency. She pokes fun at herself, her cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her life between East and West has placed her. Cultural displacement has given her the capacity to live out her healing vision.  Armored with her Persian amulets and Greek anti-evil eye bracelets, Super East-West Woman chases away the evil for which each nation blames the other.  Her timely work is magnified in importance as it was set in Egypt.  Her Sufi dance for peace and union signals a profound message in light of the suicide bombing in Alexandria outside a Coptic church on New Year’s Day and the current protests and clashes in Egypt.

Lisa Zukowski’s latest series, Clootie, reflects her desire for and practice towards healing and change.  It is both a lament and a celebration.  Zukowski shreds her own discarded clothing in a symbolic gesture of destroying old ways in the hope of creating a better new reality. The original structure of the clothes are destroyed, buried in wax, and transformed into something positive. Originating from a personal desire for transformation, the works have come to represent the universal desire for healing and change.

Clootie Wall is an ongoing installation initially exhibited in Beacon, NY in November 2010. It is an interactive work consisting of a mesh wall upon which hundreds of strips of rags are tied. After shredding her unwanted clothing and linens and dipping them in indigo, Zukowski tied them to the mesh. Each rag on the wall represents a wish or a hope for healing and change.  The viewer is encouraged to participate by writing a wish on a rag and tying it onto the mesh, adding their wish to the wall.  Powerful interaction calls for the audience’s commitment along side and in support of the artist’s transformation making the entire process that much stronger.

The personal transcends through the artist to the collective whole of society and to the universal oneness of life itself in theses works.  The artists use the powerful color blue and the fabric of their lives to cause healing, metamorphosis, and revolution.  A must see show.

The exhibition will run from February 28-April 3, 2011.  Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am until 4pm.  The gallery is located at 538 W 29^th St. NY, NY 10001.  For more information or inquiries, please contact Gallery Director Carla Goldberg at 646-772-2407, or via email at info@skylightgallerynyc.com.