Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Loves and Lovers,” a solo exhibition of figurative charcoal drawings by Los Angeles multi-media artist Marty Schnapf. This is Schnapf’s first solo show at the gallery. Marty Schnapf grew up in a farmhouse in Newburgh, Indiana, surrounded by fields, and began his art making outdoors, often using sticks, coals and rocks as markers. When he was seven years old, his house burned down. The charred wood that was left behind held a new resonance for him. It became a kind of beautiful and terrible marker of this complex transition.
As an artist confronted by a volatile world, a global house in conflict, he “wanted to find the courage to make work about love. I bought 30 boxes of charcoals and 6 rolls of paper and began.” These vigorous and expressive drawings are drawing as performance, songs of living and dying. The figures are both intertwined and solitary, and seem barely contained, pushing against the edges of each composition.
There is private space and hidden identities. His loves and lovers are nearly life-sized; and we, the viewer, stand as voyeur and witness to the emotional drama that unfolds before us.
MARTY SCHNAPF (USA b. 1977) was born in Indiana and received his BFA from Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio (1999). Schnapf is a multi- media artist who works in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. He recently exhibited his paintings in “Santa Ana Winds,” Alice Black Gallery, London, UK (2018) and “Fissures in the Fold,” Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), and a public sculpture at the Soulangh Cultural Park in Tainan City, Taiwan. Schnapf received the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation ACE Grant for “Night Fever,” a sculptural installation in downtown Los Angeles. The artist lives in Highland Park, with his partner, the sculptor Cammie Staros.
