Heather Gaudio Fine Art announces exhibition of select works by Robert Kushner & Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh

NEW CANAAN, CT.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art, a contemporary art gallery featuring paintings, sculptures, photography, and works on paper is pleased to present their latest exhibition, Patterns and Forms, at their gallery located at 21 South Avenue in New Canaan, CT.

The exhibition will feature a compelling apposition of paintings and sculpture. A series of richly textured and opulent paintings of flowers by Robert Kushner are paired with fluid and inspiring bronze sculptures by Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh. The exhibition will run from February 2, 2012 through March 22, 2012.

Robert Kushner “At first nearly all of my compositions employed chance operation as a compositional structure. To determine the exact placement of the flowers, I made a set of small paper squares, each with an arrow drawn on it. I would select one particular flower and decide how many times it would be repeated on the painting. I placed the screen flat on the studio floor and then I (or more frequently, my son Seppi) would stand on a ladder with eyes closed and drop the squares of paper onto the screen. Wherever the paper markers fell, I painted, using the arrow to indicate the direction the flower would be facing. When this process was completed, I repeated the same procedure for additional flowers until the painting became complete. The results have always surprised me with compositions that are always satisfying and strangely unexpected.”

Robert Kushner was a founder of the anti-minimalist Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s. In 1986, Kushner began painting on canvas with his first extended series of flower paintings. Large blocks of color, lavish application of paint, delicate drawing and decorative elements of gold, silver, and glitter formed the underpinning for a profusion of floral and foliar motifs. Kushner has exhibited extensively, and his work can be found in the collections of many prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Tate Gallery in London and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh “My sculpture addresses traditional issues in art – space, mass, form, volume, line, surface and the interaction of these defining elements with variable sources of light. My intention is to create a body of work that is straightforward, tranquil and pleasing to the eye. Beyond this, I hope my work causes viewers to reflect on the ephemeral nature of life, and the fragility of our environment.”

As a sculptor, Kavanagh’s instinct is to render personal responses to life in form. For years she found inspiration within the tradition of organic abstraction, carving sculpture in the manner of Arp, Brancusi and Moore. Today, however, celebrating natural beauty per se no longer satisfies her. She feels a need to search for beauty in all aspects of nature, even those manifested by epic disasters. The TSUNAMI PROJECT, a solo exhibition created in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004, was her first large-scale effort to attempt to reconcile water’s inherent fluid grace with its horrific capacity for destruction. They were exhibited in September 2006, at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York. ARCTIC ICE MELT: moulins of my mind, a sculptural exploration of the warming of the Polar region, is Kavanagh’s latest work with water. Kavanagh’s moulin sculptures were previewed at The American Museum of Natural History and subsequently exhibited at Blue Mountain Gallery September 8 – October 3, 2009

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