LEGACIES OF ABSTRACTION

February 15-March 22, 2009

The Esther Massry Gallery at The College of Saint Rose presents “Legacies of Abstraction,” drawings, paintings and prints by New York City artists Theresa Chong, Warren Isensee and Katia Santibanez.

Theresa Chong’s intricate gouache and pencil drawings on handmade Japanese rice paper explore mark making and gesture in abstraction. While open to multiple associations and varied interpretations – celestial maps, cascading particles on a field, even musical notation (the artist is an accomplished cellist) – the work remains fundamentally and purely abstract. Chong has been inspired by Abstract Expressionism, its energy and spontaneity, as in the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and by pop art, particularly the clarity of line in the work of Roy Lichtenstein. In a 2006 catalogue essay, John Yau comments, “Chong’s drawings and animations evoke ephemerality, the appearance and disappearance of things in time.”

Chong was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1965 and immigrated with her family to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1974. She attended Oberlin Conservatory and Boston University’s School of Fine Arts. She received her master of fine arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1991. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, among others. She served two faculty residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado in 2003 and 2005. Chong received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2003 and a grant from the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in 2007.

Warren Isensee’s small, colored pencil drawings and large-scale paintings revel in vivid, exuberant, unrestrained color within the context of classic, geometric abstraction. Isensee avoids the anonymous, impersonal appearance often associated with hard-edged painting. His unexpected and playful juxtapositions of vibrant color are visually intense and emotionally expressive. In 2006, Ken Johnson, art critic for The New York Times wrote, “ These glowing grid, striped and concentric rectangle paintings play adroitly with conventions of Modernist abstraction and are almost hallucinogenically beautiful.”

Born in Asheville, N.C., in 1956, Isensee studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma and subsequently majored in painting and graphic design. The artist was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts and received a Purchase Award. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1999 and has exhibited extensively in the United States. Isensee’s work is held in the collections of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., among others.

Katia Santibañez’s paintings and drawings synthesize geometric patterns with organic forms in order to bring nature and architecture to an abstract state. Intricate and delicate, her art reveals the intimacy of the artist’s hand and mind. Santibañez’s work is both a rational examination of the grid, the core of 20th century reductivist aesthetics and a distillation of nature with associations to natural forms such as saplings, ferns, vines and roots. While working within the grid, the artist explores a boundless variety of possibilities that are evocative with a restrained expressiveness. In the exhibition catalogue for Santibañez’s 2008 solo show at Danese Gallery, Dr. Lucy Bowditch, Saint Rose art historian comments, “Each square is a unique formal visual poem. Santibañez starts with a familiar structure and then generates unbounded variety and possibility within that system.”

Santibañez was born in Paris in 1964. She earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in 1990 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. Santibañez’s paintings and drawings have been included in numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad.

All three artists live and work in New York City and are represented by the Danese Gallery in Chelsea. Santibañez also is represented by the Morgan Lehman Gallery. For additional images and information, please visit www.danese.com or www.morganlehmangallery.com.