Lora Schlesinger Gallery is proud to present Another Cold Winter, Lawrence Gipe’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new series of paintings. The exhibition opens with an artists’ reception, Saturday June 2nd from 4-6pm, and is on view through July 14, 2018.
Sourced mainly from images dated between 1946-1950, Lawrence Gipe’s Another Cold Winter examines the visual rhetoric of the “reconstruction” era, when Europe was recovering from the devastation of World War II with aid from the US. The title quotes a photo caption from Fortune Magazine in 1947: “It looks like another cold winter for England,” referencing an image of citizens trudging home after work with the rebuilding of the Thames banks in the background. Europe–especially England–did, in fact, endure two of their harshest winters just after the war. Gipe uses the romantic convention of smoke-filled landscapes to address this period, a literal last gasp of the rapidly de-centralizing heavy industrial complex, and represents an age that operated without consideration to ecological consequences. Gipe’s paintings employ a pre-Impressionist style, which aesthetically circles back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th Century, rendering scenes that are both beautiful and tragic.
Lawrence Gipe’s art ranges from painting, drawing, and installations that address the visual power of nostalgia, authoritarianism, and technology. Past notable exhibitions include the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany; BlumHelman Gallery, NYC; Alexander Gray Associates, NYC; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, AZ (mid-career survey); Amerika-Haus, Berlin, Germany. He has been awarded two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Lora Schlesinger Gallery is also proud to present WHOA!, Richard Bruland’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new abstract paintings.
Richard Bruland’s latest body of work considers how time fundamentally impacts an artist’s painting process, which can often be artificially rushed to meet deadlines. By working without such constraints for this series, Bruland expresses that the resulting lack of pressure became an essential part of his process. Through consciously making the effort to “slowdown,” Bruland acknowledges a willingness to allow these paintings to find themselves on their own terms. He hopes this approach will encourage a more contemplative viewing of these highly detailed, complex syntheses of color and texture.
Richard Bruland studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning his Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of Arts. His work has been exhibited in California since 1988 and he is represented by galleries throughout the United States.
Exhibition Dates: June 2 – July 14, 2018
Opening Reception: June 2, 4-6pm
