J. Cacciola Gallery W is pleased to announce “Reimagine Everything,” featuring works by contemporary artists Diana González Gandolfi, Lisa Pressman, and Adam Welch. This show is the artists’ debut exhibition with J. Cacciola Gallery W.
Born in Argentina, Diana González Gandolfi’s family travelled widely during her youth to accommodate her architect father’s career. She’s lived in places as varied as Colombia, Indonesia, and New York, instilling in her an acute awareness of the world’s cultures, their beauty and their injustices. Her work harnesses and transcribes these themes by abstracting them and re-ordering them into dynamic compositions in encaustic and mixed media, whose energies shimmer through their layers.
Diana González Gandolfi’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout New Jersey and the United States, including New Jersey’s Stedman Gallery at Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts, the Hunterdon Art Museum, the Pringle Gallery in Philadelphia, Boston’s Randall Beck Gallery, the Hauck Gallery at the University of Maine in Orono, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Residency Grant, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Painting Fellowship, a National Association of Women Artists Medal of Honor, and several others.
Lisa Pressman is a painter whose work is an exploration of time. In her two most recent series, “Passing Through” and “Stop”—with selections from both in J. Cacciola Gallery W’s “Reimagine Everything” exhibition— Pressman’s paintings are the vessels that carry her, and us, through the stream of time. Pressman’s mastery of encaustic and oil media, her elegant understanding of color, line and shape, presents the viewer with exquisite imagery rich in aesthetic pleasure, as well as deep emotional and psychological meaning.
Lisa Pressman’s work has been exhibited in important venues in New Jersey and across the country, with shows in New York’s Curator Gallery, Susan Eley Fine Art, the Hunterdon Art Museum, and others. She has been featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, the Star Ledger, and Art Speak.
Adam Welch is a ceramicist whose oeuvre consists of handmade bricks. By respecting the heritage of the brick, Welch takes license to deconstruct its purpose and recreate the form as a challenge to the definition of thing-ness. In Welch’s assemblages of his bricks—i.e., a multicolored pile, bricks painted using Martha Stewart’s line of house paints, or bricks doused in genuine gold—objectivity is redefined. The viewer’s relationship to the brick, this mundane, workaday thing, is changed, leading us into an experience of the transcendent.
Adam Welch’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in venues nationwide, including the Hunterdon Art Museum, New York’s Hunter College, AIR Gallery, and Chautauqua Center for Visual Arts, American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Kansas. He currently serves as the Director of Greenwich House Pottery in New York City. Welch is a widely read contributor to several ceramic art publications, and is a lecturer on the faculty of Princeton University. He is the recipient of significant awards from the Warhol Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University, and others.