Beyond Description

Press Kit

Curators:
Eric Elliott & Jordan Wolfson

Venues & Times:
Figure Ground Art Gallery: August 4th - Sept 30th
Sugarlift: August 4th - August 30th

New York Opening:
Thursday, August 4th 5-9 PM

Seattle Opening:
Thursday, August 4th 5-9 PM and Thursday, September 1st 5-9 PM

From the Curators:

Human beings have been making two-dimensional handmade images for tens of thousands of years. The great project of Modernity provided the opportunity for radical, personal, creative experimentation in form. Individual, first-hand experience became paramount as a source, and through the impact and influence of painters such as Monet and Cézanne, the investigation of perception, and its relationship to being, became a key element. Modernity as a cultural era ended approximately fifty years ago, but the possibility of painting, and its attendant exploration of the interconnections between seeing, marking and being, as a vehicle for deep human engagement, continues unabated. This exhibition was curated with those concerns in mind, and heart.

The exhibition presents 18 painters in dialogue with the visible world, seeking to translate felt perception into paint. For them, meaning is located in the form itself, derived and generated in the relationships between the artist, the motif, and the painting. Each painter sees the world through their own particular lens, yet all ask themselves how it is possible to bring colored mud to life, and what that might say about the world we live in, and what it means to be human.

Eric Elliot & Jordan Wolfson

From the Introduction to the Show Catalogue

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So many of the powers of painting begin where mere depiction ends. They lie beyond description—and this of course inspired these two exhibitions curated by Eric Elliott and Jordan Wolfson. The eighteen participating artists include the much-esteemed veterans, as well as younger and mid-career painters from around the country and the world.

The strategies of the artists in Beyond Description take many paths, including investigations of the processes of seeing and representing, exploring the materiality of the painting medium, and fragmenting and rebuilding the observed in time and space. But every painter, in his or her fashion, examines what it means to see the world today, and re-make it on canvas or panel.

Our surroundings do not stay still, and neither do we. Our understandings and even our perceptions shift with time, place and vantage point. But as “Beyond Description” reminds us, human perceptions can endure, captured as individual visions, and expressed through the unique discipline of painting. In these two exhibitions, the results ultimately speak for themselves, as varied, intense and eloquent as the artists themselves.

John Goodrich

From the owner of the Figure Ground Art Gallery:

Beyond Description is a historic collection of contemporary representational painters curated by Eric Elliot and Jordan Wolfson. The subjects of the paintings - still-life’s, florals, figurative works, and interior scenes - is less important than how the artist is engaging with their senses and interpreting the world around them. These works feel of our time. Their coherence as a group comes from the freedom, playfulness, and unique innovative approach of each artist. Together they demonstrate that the grassroots resurgence in figurative and representational art around the world has become a historic art movement.

It is also historic that the show opens simultaneously in New York and Seattle. Both cities have strong figurative art communities that gravitate around active art ateliers that continue to produce technically proficient artists who need representation, and both galleries have made it a habit to offer major debut shows to emerging artists.

Sugarlift, which highlights contemporary realism from their space in Chelsea beneath the Highline, was founded in 2014 with the mission to “to help more artists create sustainable careers.” Figure Ground was founded only one year ago in an upstairs space in Pioneer Square, Seattle with the mission to show “masterpieces of representational art by living artists.”

Both galleries are helping to bring about a flourishing art culture by curating realism that is fresh and exciting for a modern audience, promoting collecting for the love of art, and establishing that the role of the gallery is to give artists the freedom and ability make great art.

Brett Holverstott

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