NEW YORK NEW YORK

Rebecca E. Chamberlain
Elizabeth Huey
Megan Whitmarsh

ROUND TABLE WITH THE ARTISTS
New trends on American contemporary art
Vittoria Coen and Alberta Gnugnoli

Thursday January 19 2006 9 pm
Auditorium Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center  Via Belmeloro 11 Bologna

OPENING
Friday January 20  2006 6-9 pm
January 20 – March 18 2006

Agenzia04 is proud to announce the opening of the project New York New Work, a group show featuring three American artists emerging in the New York area.
In the occasion of the artists’ coming to Bologna it will be held as a preview a round table in cooperation with the Association Friends of the Johns Hopkins University of Bologna. It is a very special event that will give the public the opportunity of knowing this last generation of artists’ work and becoming acquainted with American contemporary art’s topics. It will involve two of the most significant critics personalities: Vittoria Coen, expert of American art new trends and Alberta Gnugnoli, which will propose a lecture of historical avant-gards and their link to contemporary art.

Built in the spirit of PS1 recent exhibition Greater New York, it was conceived as an exhibition focusing on some of the most interesting and promising artists whose careers are taking off in the “big apple” artistic scene.
Our wish is to offer to the Italian public and collectors a “preview” for these three young artists who are fast capturing the interest of collectors and galleries in the US: Rebecca E. Chamberlain, Elizabeth Huey, Megan Whitmarsh.
After an accurate selection process, the artists on show figure out a common artistic direction, they represent a shared American artistic identity and an innovative approach to painting and drawing that is attracting attention, several shows in Chelsea and Brooklyn galleries being an example.
The show try to exemplify this common thread involving a narrative fantasy where an open-end invites the viewer to guess the implications of the elements within the painting.
The suggestion of another world underneath the literal one, a dialogue between optimistic and unsettling, real and fiction, present and past are also explored.
In that art self is never dismissed, the implications of the unconscious are intense and they often build parallels between one’s environment and specific psychological behaviors hiding repressed dreams or traumas.
The trend is exploring ambiguous and contradictory states of mind and identify a society swinging between abandoning itself to the dream and happiness, and a deep consciousness of not being able to solve world’s troubles. The only escape seems taking refuge to fictional landscapes or architectures.

Rebecca E. Chamberlain
Born 1970 in Pennsylvania, lives and works in New York.
Obsessed by images of American depression era interiors, R.C. creates moody drawings which play with the concepts of inside/outside, present/past. The places are luminous and beautiful but they cannot infuse happiness, they are empty and evoke a feeling of loneliness.
The medium is a special translucent blue ink squeezed from cracked-open ball point pens on vintage velum that add a unique atmosphere to these works.

Elizabeth Huey
Born in Virginia, lives and works in New York.
Utilizing an image repertoire filled with mystical electronics, melting paths, tangled couples, and shady saviors, E.H. paintings provide a landscape where the past and the present, the literal and fictive worlds dual one another in a very fresh dialectic. Phantoms, angels, explosions of color, and hard-pressed scribbles personify the unconscious and its repressed memories, traumas and desires. Engaged empathetically with the forgotten or voiceless (it is the case of the picture cycle dedicated to a Center for Feeble-Minded Children where disabled children were used for radiation experiments unbeknownst to their parents) the artist shows a deep sensibility influenced by a personal locked away during her adolescence that created in her mind a merger of images and topics that time by time come out and make so intense her work.

Megan Whitmarsh
Born 1972, lives in Los Angeles and works between LA and NY.
M.W.’s work consists in representation of Yetis, Elves and other fiction and real characters creating a personal world from various origins and remembering pop icons. These figures are sewn in different sizes and aptitudes over monochromatic stretched fabrics. This interesting work of embroideries characterizes as well a current approach in art that is the anthropomorphic miniaturization representing a whimsical mood to filter reality and a personal perception of contemporary life involving both playful and ironic points of view.

Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 3 – 7 pm or by appointment

For further information please contact Giulia Allegri ph +39 333 3781246 e-mail gallegri@agenzia04.com

agenzia04 via Brugnoli 19/C 40122 Bologna / Italia
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