A Two-Person Exhibition
Greene County Council on the Arts (GCCA) launches its 2018 season with “Ginnie Gardiner & Martin Katzoff: Conversations in Color.” The concept of the exhibition came from a pairing of the two artists’ works at the Patricia Field ArtFashion show in October 2017 by production designer Geoff Howell. GCCA’s Visual Arts Director, Niva Dorell, was struck by the similarities in gesture and flow between the two artists’ vibrant paintings, which seemed to talk to each other from across time and canvases. Gardiner and Katzoff, both Catskill residents, will participate in an Artist Talk about painting and color during the exhibition. They will also be present at the opening reception, which will be held on Saturday, January 27 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm at GCCA’s gallery, immediately following the GCCA Annual Membership Meeting. GCCA’s gallery is located at 398 Main Street, Catskill, NY. Both events will be free and open to the public.
Gardiner’s large-scale oil paintings in Conversations in Color are from her “Talking with Tiepolo” series that she created in the late 1990’s. Inspired by Baroque master Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), this series resulted in two solo exhibitions in New York and Minneapolis in 2000, and depicts images fusing Baroque references with a range of contemporary images in layered pictorial spaces, producing paintings rich in color and dramatic figuration. Gardiner cites a passage from ‘Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence,’ written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, as a perfect summation of her personal approach to creating these images: “The mind plays with images, and they can take different forms: figures can drift between two and three dimensions before full recognition; they are curiously medium-free; they can move in slow motion…the array displays a coherence, but is strange or bizarre; time is not an issue.” Tiepolo’s amazing frescos, and Gardiner’s connection with them, can be explored further on her website’s ‘Visual Thinking’ blog ‘Time Traveling With Tiepolo’: http://ginniegardiner.com/visual-thinking/.
Ginnie Gardiner graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1974. In 2005, Ginnie and her husband moved to Catskill, where they purchased, renovated and restored the Catskill Lyceum, a Federal era building, where Thomas Cole gave his lectures on American Scenery in 1836. Gardiner’s recent paintings will be featured in a solo exhibition titled “The Color Prophecies” at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum from October 20th – November 25th, 2018.
Martin Katzoff’s paintings in Conversations in Color, from his Untitled Exploration series, are more abstract than Gardiner’s, but no less vibrant or rich in texture. A printmaker as well as painter, Katzoff primarily creates from a place of intuition. With this series, he says he was attempting to access a roadmap to a subconscious perception of experience of reality, and conveying a sense of freedom and openness in how they are Interpreted. “Each painting represents the release of anxieties with the objective of moving through time, some figural elements represent interpreted personal experiences, but the main objective of the series was to loosen up and go along for the ride.”
Katzoff is originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and has been living in Catskill for the past few years as he studies for his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bard College. He cites the beautiful nature of the Hudson Valley as a major influence on his recent artwork. He is currently involved in a project with Freehand Hotels, painting murals at their soon-to-open location in Gramercy Park.
The Greene County Council on the Arts Gallery is located at 398 Main Street in Catskill, NY. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Saturdays from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. GCCA is closed on Sundays. For more information on upcoming exhibits, events, artist and grant opportunities, visit www.greenearts.org or call 518-943-3400.
