Sati Zech

Arbeiten

Work

Tracey Adams, Richard Baker, Andrea Collesano, Holly Farrell, Dietlind Vander Schaaf

Details Works 

Exhibition Details

Clark Gallery is honored to present Sati Zech's first solo exhibition in New England with a selection of her compelling assemblages and constructions entitled "Arbeiten".Born in 1958 in Southern Germany, Berlin-based painter Sati Zech attended the Berlin University of Fine Arts from 1982-1987, studying sculpture and drawing under Lothar Fischer. For nearly a decade, Zech lectured at the Academy for Fine Arts in Marrakesh and also taught at the Weissensee School of Fine Arts in Berlin.

Although technically referred to as paintings, the works in her vibrant series titled Bollenarbeit—a reference to the vineyard-covered hills and low mountains found in the region where Zech was born—float between paintings, drawings, and sculptures. While the sumptuous displays of thick, bright red mounds of paint applied on naked strips of linen are visually arresting, it is the process Zech employs to create these cloth fields of intense color concentration that is most remarkable.

After tearing apart sheets of canvas, Zech assembles the strips—unraveled edges and all—in horizontal and vertical rows. Sometimes overlapping them, she joins the rows with white archival glue, bits of puttylike plaster and thread before or after applying viscous domes and dots of red paint across the cloth’s surface. The resulting crimson fingerprint-like shapes spreading across the sheet’s ragged lines and seams hold  minefields of meaning while conjuring the landscape or human habitat. 

While the acts of layering, tearing, gluing and sewing produce works that are reminiscent of domestic handicraft, and the scarlet mounds of paint hint at historically ritualistic mark-making, Zech’s dynamic creations defy category. They inhabit a world of their own.

 Zech has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including  the Franz Joseph Speigler Prize.  Zech has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, as well as art fairs, in cities such as Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Salzburg, Zurich, Bilbao, New York, and Mexico.

In a companion exhibition, artists Tracey Adams, Richard Baker, Andrea Cosellano, Holly Farrell, and Dietlind Vander Schaaf are featured in: "Work x 5"

Tracey Adams's lyrical compositions and elegantly rendered lines and gestures can be traced to her early traiining as a musician, A long-time resident along the California coastline, Tracey's work references her surroundings and the topography she encounters and contemplates. Although a Californian, Tracy has strong ties to the Boston region having  completed her master’s degree at the New England Conservatory of Music, whie she concurrently studied painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has had solo shows at the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Museum of Art, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. In 2003, she was invited to exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Medzilaborce, Slovak Republic, a project supported by artist’s grants from the US Department of State and the Ministry of Culture. She is also a recipient of an Artist’s Grant from the Community Foundation of the Monterey Peninsula. Adams was recently awarded  a 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. 

Richard Baker's  body of work, including his highly praised still-lifes, have evolved over years of co-mingling depictions of two dimensional representations with a rendering of three dimensional forms.  The artist captures the details of not only the images themselves, but also the wear and tear of years upon the books, objects and deitrus he depicts. His subjects give attention to inevitable signs of use–an apt metaphor for the process of aging and the absorption of history. As physical objects Richard’s paintings represent the lure of memory, reverie, desire and love and are deeply nostalgic. The paintings are imbued with the recognition of how some things, books, or even a pencil or a cocktal, can be powerful icons and containers of memory and emotion that serve as stand-ins and time-specific chronicles of our lives. In his inclusion of books and literary references in his still-lifes, Baker realizes that he has chosen books as a primary subject matter in an era of new reading technologies and that his book portraits have now taken on another layer of meaning as reminders of mortality.

Holly Farrell’s paintings of every day objects - book covers, neckties, linens, aging toys and even bars of soap are simple but arresting objects that conjure up emotions of lost memories. Like Baker, the "lure of memory" is palpable in her work, evoking love, desire and lives lived and lost. Informed by a distinct Americana sensibility Holly’s stark realism is  both timeless and immediate, akin to sensory snapshots embedded in our mind.

Dietlind Vander Schaaf works with molten beeswax mixed with resin, oil paint and pigments, along with gold and silver leaf.  Dieltind fuses the act of painting with repetitive and meditative mark-making of deep gouges and scratches into her beautifully layered surfaces of polished enaustic. While the physicality of Dietlind’s paintings are both emotinally visceral and sensual, they are rich with associations to Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism and spiritual contemplative practices. Her work embodies a dynamic interplay between chaos and a sublime calm.