Diane Rosenstein Gallery is happy to announce Shelter From the Storm, a three-artist exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works by Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, Sarah Mikenis, and Jason Stopa. The works in this show reference totems, shields, architecture, and tapestries with challenging formal and emotional resonance. The artists use a variety of strategies to make work with a social function: covering, sheltering, protecting and resisting.
Sarah Mikenis’ new series of Venice Paintings invites a myriad of associations: tents, shrouds, sheets, and blankets. This suite of abstract paintings uses oil paint over a draped canvas. The artist, who is based in Los Angeles, focused her energy into building the sculptural form and began anchoring the canvas down at certain points. She writes, “My body and touch seem more present in these works…Creating the sculptural form is a very physical process in which I am on the ground pulling, twisting, and pushing canvas. I think freedom plays an important role in this work.” Mikenis’ saturated skyscapes are a record of both that tension and a capacious play of light and color.
Jason Stopa makes graphic, abstract oil paintings that resemble flattened sculptures. The Brooklyn-based artist’s paintings reference utopian architecture. Stopa states, “I am after an abstraction that is two-fold: one that is critical of our notions of progress and also opens up a horizon of possibilities. This ambiguity is what Edouard Glissant would call ‘creolization,’ and in this way, my work also reflects my identity as a mixed man.” In a 2021 review, The New Criterion highlighted that Stopa deploys “buoyant, lively color systems defined by opaque grounds and translucent glazes, Stopa’s paintings celebrate the power of color in its own right. He often counteracts the structural solidity of the composition by deploying an idiosyncratic range of painterly techniques. In premeditated but unfussy brushstrokes, Stopa lays down oil colors rapidly, imbuing each painting with a sense of urgency.”
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline is interested in the healing capacities of painting and sculpture, and she explores “the age-old issues of intimacy, psychology, and intergenerational trauma.” Her depictions of bodily forms use a variety of media and materials including ink, acrylics, oil pastel, papyrus, wood, pearls and thread. In her paintings (on sycamore felled by a recent hurricane) and mixed media works on papyrus, there is a calligraphic treatment of the forms and the
human body that is influenced by the tradition of Persian calligraphy in the artist’s family. The artist, who is based in Nashville, states, ”Carved out from the distractions of place, situation, context and time, emotionally-charged figures take center stage as they grapple with the complexity of self, intimacy, and each other….The work alludes to both the comfort and peril of interdependency and vulnerability, referencing questions of protection and safety, longing and loss.”
Shelter From the Storm opens on April 16th with a reception for the artists.
For press inquiries or more information about the artists and works in this exhibition, please contact jiahao@dianerosenstein.com
