Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 7th, 5 - 7pm

The Painting Center is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Joan Nelson, Constance LaPalombara, Ginger Levant and Bonnie Levinthal, titled Natural Order.

Each artist brings to this exhibition a different approach to materials, scale, sources and reality. For each, the different geographic locations affect the nature of the work, but all four have a distinctly American view. Though they all share a respect for tradition, all are working to interpret it through a contemporary and personal lens.

Ginger Levant, a New York City resident paints on location. These places are sometimes remote-the Spanish Pyreness, the hills of Tuscany, sometimes close by – the U.S. northeast. The paintings juxtapose human history as seen in local architecture with the wildness of the natural elements. Her tonality and layered brushstrokes evoking flora and fauna are imbedded in a larger, almost cubist structure.

Bonnie Levinthal is a Philadelphia-based multimedia artist working with painting, photography and digital imagery. Her recent works explore distant landscapes filtered through memory. The work represents a synthesis of experience, a contemplation on order, light and shadow, and the atmosphere of the natural world. Using many transparent layers of color and combining imagery, her works evoke the effects of movement and offer a reflection of an ever-changing reality.

Constance LaPalombara’s urban landscapes focus on the city where she lives, New Haven, CT. They are not intended as a portrait of that city but rather, are a response to light and shadow as these elements play out across the architectural forms of the buildings. It is the depiction of light in the paintings that is the transformative element and which often evokes another, metaphysical reality.

Joan Nelson lives and works in upstate New York. Nelson has been a well-known presence in the art world with many solo shows at Robert Miller and her work is represented in major museums across America. With a decidedly post-modern sensibility, she recreates appropriated fragments of American master landscape paintings to provide a view that is at once romantic and ironic.

We hope to see you there!

Natural Order will also be on exhibit at The University of Delaware, from March 18 to April 26, 2009.