Corinth Group
On View: February 8th to March 12th, 2019
Opening reception: March 1st, 6 - 8pm
LaMontagne Gallery is pleased to present Corinth Group show, curated by and featuring artists inspired by Corinth, a small town in Vermont:
The connection to the artists, my family's history in Corinth and wanting to raise awareness of the contemporary art happening there was the original inspiration for the show. It was also an opportunity to share how the community evolved and how the relationships between the artist the town influenced their process - Russell LaMontagne.
The artists, Luke Butler, Kathy Chapman, Nick DeFriez, Fritz Gross, Corin H. Hewitt, and Zachary Wollard come from various backgrounds and generations, which translates into a diversity of their creative practice. The works on view are far from being homogenous and consist of mediums of photography, drawing and painting in styles ranging from realist, to symbolism, to Outsider.
Luke Butler’s paintings riff on themes of mortality, self-portraiture and what the artist calls “epic frailty”. In the series integrated in the show, the words “The End” or producer credits such as “L BUTLER PICTURES” run seascapes. Through their appropriations, the paintings have a ventriloquist aspect wherein their objective cinematic appearance masks the revelation of a highly subjective voice. In dialogue with artists such as Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, and Vija Celmins, these works rehearse conclusions for which the preceding story is forever a mystery.
Kathy Chapman started painting in the early 1980s while pursuing her BFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Photography taught her how to see and be in the moment while painting offered a response to a basic creative urge. Chapman says that surrounding herself with color and paint is pure joy. She starts a painting with large fields of color until its characters appear and the storytelling begins.
Nick DeFriez works with mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, and wood. Many of his works are concerned with time: DeFriez has lived in the same place and studied the same landscape for thirty-three years. The drawings presented in the show are parts of a project “Hillsides and Hexagons” and are based on a hexagonal grid.
Friedrich (Fritz) Gross is a self-taught Swiss-American artist. Gross was a house painter in Zurich before immigrating to the United States. Over the years he expanded his practice to painting furniture, panels, and canvases. He also began drawing, sculpting, and etching. In the late 1980's, Friedrich left the city of New York and moved Vermont where he built a farm and raised a flock of animals. His art centers around his domestic life and is a combination of folklore, myth, and fantasy.
Corin Hewitt is an artist raised in East Corinth, Vermont. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and attended both the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He also received an MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. He has had several US solo museum exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland and The Seattle Art Museum. Hewitt has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), and the Rome Prize (2014). He is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Zachary Wollard was born in Colorado and attended Columbia University in NYC. In his recent works, a phenomenon of pareidolia, a condition that often leads to people assigning human characteristics to objects, has been employed as a primary methodology. Wollard uses thin layers of paint to create stains on the prepared canvases through which compositions evolve. Wollard’s works have been included in exhibitions internationally and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City, among others.