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Email PageLaura Battle and Sarah Lutz: Recent Works
September 6, 2007- October 13, 2007
Reception: September 8, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Laura Battle, Sarah Lutz
Lohin Geduld Gallery
531 W 25th St Laura Battle Time Piece (for Emma Kunz) (2006) |  Sarah Lutz Congeries (Mollusk) (2006) |
Laura Battle’s pencil and ink drawings immerse the viewer in a world of elegant beauty and intellectual engagement. These diagrammatic works seem to want nothing less than to reveal the secrets of the universe. Points in space chart movements and sequences, exposing sublime patterns that are familiar and yet beyond the realm of comprehension.
Through formal exploration Battle uncovers the inherent logic and surprising beauty to be found in simple geometric patterning and optics. Her drawings chart the course of space, time, molecular movement, and our relationship to these phenomena. But they are not mere renderings of known facts. Battle makes discoveries as she works, adjusting and improvising her lines and forms as relationships emerge out of the drawing process.
Laura Battle continues in a lineage of artists fascinated with the space where science and art intersect, the fertile ground where imagination and fact co-mingle. These drawings are a powerful artist’s response to the world, a communion with the greater whole, a hymn to the moments when art can make one feel part of something greater than the individual.
Sarah Lutz’s paintings and works on paper also deal with natural phenomena, but in a much different way. Biology and meteorology are the dominant forces in Lutz’s work. Organic forms divide and propagate, creating pile-ups of animated shapes both comic and tragic. Atmosphere and weather conditions are palpable, inducing physical and emotional responses from the viewer.
Lutz divides her compositions in half--sky and ground, heaven and earth. It is in this context that her forms struggle and cavort, seeming to want freedom from gravitational pull but enjoying it none the less. Lutz paints a fecund world, where reproduction and cross pollenization are the order of the day. Her shimmering surfaces of scumbled paint and glazes dance with color and flickering light.
There is a longing for transcendence in Sarah Lutz’s work. It is transcendence tempered with slapstick humor and a love of formal painting invention. Lutz revels in nature’s sensuality and evolutionary cycling. The struggles and triumphs of her flora and fauna are a stand-in for our own mind, body, spirit conundrum.
Laura Battle is a professor of painting at Bard College. She received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Painting Center, Franklin Furnace Archive, Vassar College, Wheelock College in Boston, Kanazawa College of Art in Japan, and many others.
Sarah Lutz received a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College and an MFA from The American University. She has exhibited her work at the Richmond Art Center at The Loomis Chaffee School, 55 Mercer Gallery, The Painting Center, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, the Bromfield Gallery, DNA Gallery, Brick Walk Books and Fine Art, and Miranda Fine Arts.
Catalog available, with essay by Linda Weintraub.
Art Reviews of Laura Battle and Sarah Lutz: Recent Works
| The Village Voice September 25, 2007 | R. C. Baker | "Buy someone a drink for pairing this disparate duo—they're opposite sides of a beautifully funky coin...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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