CAPTURING THE ARTIST: CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL PORTRAITS FROM LIFE

CAPTURING THE ARTIST:
Contemporary and Historical Portraits from Life

November 14 - December 20, 2019

OPENING:
Thursday, November 14th | 6 - 8pm

Hours: Monday - Friday | 10am - 5pm

Select Saturdays: November 16, December 7, December 14 | 11am - 4pm

Robert Simon Fine Art is pleased to announce “Capturing the Artist” an exhibition of contemporary portraiture, together with  historical precedents, at its gallery at 22 East 80th Street, Fourth Floor, New York, NY.

The three-month exhibit will consist of painting and sculpture inspired by portraits from the Renaissance through the twentieth century that capture their subjects through direct observation. While many of today’s portrait artists increasingly use technology and photography to record their subjects, the artwork in this show will be entirely artist generated, created from life, without the use of such modern tools.

“The bond that exists between an artist and his or her subject is a palpable one that is never so powerfully felt as when a portrait is made from life,” said Robert Simon, the gallery’s owner who has assembled a group of historical portraits to show alongside the contemporary ones. “This show celebrates the traditional techniques and modes of portraiture dating back to the Renaissance that are preserved and elaborated by artists working today.” The subjects of all the portraits, both old and new, are artists, broadly defined —creative figures who are often close friends of those who portray them.

“Many artists in the portrait community feel that painting from photos, which obviously didn’t exist in the Renaissance period, require their own category, and vocabulary, and cannot not be viewed with the same understanding as paintings created from life,” said Dale Zinkowski, a co-curator for the exhibit and a showing painter.

He adds, “Painting (or sculpting) a portrait (from life) over the course of several hours, often over several days, is incredibly hard to explain unless one has experienced it. It captures a moment between artist and subject — compressing hours of enjoyment from life, of life, onto the canvas. There is something special that happens when the artist and the sitter are sharing a space together, which cannot be replicated with technology.”

The contemporary artists exhibiting include: Anthony Baus; Brendan Johnston; Charlie Mostow; Dale Zinkowski; Daniel Graves; Diana Buitrago; Greg Mortenson; Jacob Collins; Jessica Artman; Jon Brogie; Jon deMartin; Jordan Sokol; Kate Lehman; Katie Engberg; Kevin Muller Cisneros; Patrick Byrnes; Per Elof Nilsson Ricklund; Rodrigo Mateo; Rubin Gabeau; Savannah Tate Cuff; Ted Minoff; Travis Schlaht; Tsultrim Tenzin and Zoe Dufour.

The historical artists shown include: John Singer Sargent; Simon Vouet; John Opie; Peder Severin Krøyer; Elisabeth Jericho-Baumann; Anton Einsle; Charles Carolus-Duran; George Healy; Fritz Behn; Il Piccio and others.

Artists in Conversation
Robert Simon, Milene Fernandez, and Dale Zinkowski will discuss aspects of contemporary portraiture with comments from artists represented in the exhibition on Monday, December 16, 2019 from 6:00 PM 8:30 PM

RSVP is required and space is limited. Please email Dominic Ferrante at dfj@robertsimon.com to attend.

OCTOBER ART WEEK | ART WALK

Thursday, October 30, 2019
5 - 9pm

Robert Simon Fine Art
22 East 80th Street, Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10075

We are excited to again participate
in the October Art Week Art Walk!

Please stop by the gallery and enjoy refreshments
while perusing our exhibition.

For more information on the event, please visit: www.octoberartweek.com

PAMELA TALESE : The Third Rome

.

THE THIRD ROME
Allegorical Landscapes of the Modern City

November 7 - December 15, 2018
Opening Reception, Wednesday, November 7th, 6-9pm

Hours: Monday - Friday, 10am - 5:30pm
Also Open Saturday December 1st, 8th and 15th from 11 - 5pm

*As featured in The New Criterion’s Critic’s Notebook!

Paintings of modern Rome by New York artist Pamela Talese will be featured in an exhibition opening November 7th at Robert Simon Fine Art at 22 East 80th Street. The group of small-scale oils reflects the painter’s multi-year exploration of late nineteenth century and twentieth- century sites and neighborhoods of the city overlooked by tourists but vibrant with the energy of contemporary life and redolent of their fraught twentieth-century past.

THE THIRD ROME takes its title from Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini’s celebrated dictum that “After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people.” This became a cultural mantra for Mussolini during his regime (1922-1943) – and one that was manifested by the massive transformation of the architectural and civic landscape of the city. Many of the buildings and monuments of the Fascist era remain, accompanied by the long shadow of pseudo-populism.

This is the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist at Robert Simon Fine Art, which specializes in Old Master paintings. Robert Simon comments, “This is not the Rome of Panini or Piranesi, but one unvarnished, so to speak, and one which reveals the tragedy as well as the triumph of the city’s history. The contrasts of the brutal elegance of the modern structures, both appealing and unnerving, with the older architecture creates a dialogue that raises issues that resonate today: the transience of political power, the tragedy of demagogic populism, and the vitality of the individual.”

Many of the paintings were completed on site during Talese’s annual visits to Rome, which began in 2012. Nearly half were done around the Foro Italico (formerly Foro Mussolini) in Rome’s northern section. Built between 1928 and 1938, the Foro Italico was a sports complex intended for the Olympic Games --as well as a school where young boys trained in aggressive combat sports which, Mussolini believed, would develop the qualities of good soldiers. Throughout the park, the giant figures of Carrara marble stand naked and posed – each holding the implement of his sport. Talese’s re-imagined interpretation of their classical style portrays both the visible and invisible, past and present, experience and evidence, of these ordinary people, civic leaders, tyrants, and of course, defeated heroes.

“Benito Mussolini was the Robert Moses of Rome, both ‘master builders’ with megalomaniacal views of what their city should look like regardless of the people who lived in it,” notes Pamela Talese. “Mussolini’s Third Rome was one of constant and remorseless demolitions in the city center which outpaced the building of new neighborhoods on the periphery. By the early 1930’s, this propaganda-driven planning left at least 25,000 Romans homeless.”

The themes of Talese’s previous exhibitions “718,” focusing on sites in New York’s outer boroughs, through “Rust Never Sleeps,” an essay on industrial decay, find new life in this ancient city.

For more images from the exhibition, including installation views,
please click through to our contemporary page:

CONTEMPORARY

Image: Marble Athlete With Club from the Province of Lecce. Oil on panel, 9 3/4 x 9 3/4 in

Gazometri, Ostiense

Marble Athlete and Big Cloud

Marble Athletes (Siena and Alessandria)

Minerva Medica and Tram Wires

Robert Simon Speaks to The Friends of the Uffizi Gallery