Denise Bibro Fine Art is pleased to announce the exhibition, Under Construction: Dimensional Interludes and vintage works by Leonard Rosenfeld, May 10 - June 16, 2018.
The streets of New York are riveted with barricades, construction cones, and massive machinery. The skyline is darted with installations of steel grids, concrete planes, cranes, cement trucks and top hats everywhere. The busyness of construction is almost 24/7 in a city that never sleeps.
The constantly evolving topography of the city and its surrounding boroughs have been an intrigue and inspiration for artists. While living and working within New York, artists have documented the movement of change in the city, playing an integral role in the growth of change in the city landscape. Areas of Brooklyn, and parts of Manhattan are all places where artists have left an indelible mark. These changes have not only altered the topography but also the economics of the city.
The artists’ work in these two exhibitions illustrate the above. In Gallery II, Leonard Rosenfeld’s strong, powerful charcoal drawings of construction and bold city bridges and structures, illustrate that even the during the 1950’s the development of the city was in full swing. This industrial boom of the latter half of the 19th Century was a precursor to the creation of the international powerhouse that is now New York City. The high stakes and fast pace of constructing such extensive structures has made for a bustling and palpitating city, on an island less than 14 miles long.
Anne Finkelstein – Finkelstein, a native of New York continues to live and have a studio here. Her work is primarily digital photographic montage or painting of the city landscape. Combining disparate view-points she creates dynamic geometric compositions. Often, the digitally manipulated transition of images creates a unique but still familiar landscape full of asymmetrical and symmetrical elements with juxtaposed shapes that echo the forces, change and movement within the current city structural landscape. Finkelstein has had numerous solo and group shows throughout the United States including the FXFowle Gallery, Saint Peters Church at Citicorp, the LA center for Digital Art, the Museum at FIT and the New York Transit Museum. Her work is included in private and public corporate collections, including the Metropolitan Transit Authority and The David Lawrence Convention Center. She teaches at Parsons and FIT and runs AJ & J Design, a graphic design company.
Allan Gorman – Gorman’s work appears very realistic. It is, in fact, abstract. Inspired by the “mysterious and nostalgic power of machines and industry.” He is drawn to hidden abstract patterns and interested in conveying the aesthetic tensions, mood, and interesting designs created by – and within – those objects. Gorman’s work has been shown in countless exhibits including: “Hyperrealism" at The Illinois Institute of Art - Chicago; “Re-Presenting Realism” at the Arnot Art Museum (Elmira, NY), ArtPrize7 and ArtPrize8 in Grand Rapids, MI: The ArtHamptons Art Fair; Art Palm Springs; Art Palm Beach; The International Guild of Realism's Masterworks Traveling Museum Tour; "Something More Than Realism" at Galeria ArteLibre ;“Industrialism in the 21st Century” at the Nicole Longnecker Gallery; and most recently, “Luster – Realistic and Hyperrealistic Art of Automobiles and Motorcycles”, which made its debut at the Daytona Beach Museum of Art & Science in March 2018, and will be traveling to eight museums throughout the US through 2020.
Amir Hariri – Hariri’s artistic approach is multi-disciplinary combining drawing, painting and sculpture to study specific locations from memory with the goal of capturing passive interactions and exchanges with our built environment. Hariri’s works conveys a “theatrical backdrop for the examination, notional, weight and austerity, material roughness and more broadly transient systems.” Hariri layers graphic and ink drawings with paint, concrete, plaster and wood to showcase the interplay of symmetry, tangency, and congruence with material authenticity. From demolition to renovation interplay of various stages form new ground for imagined dwellings forged from the fragmentation of existing buildings. Hariri’s process is particularly poignant since he was exposed to revolution and war as a teenager in Iran. His personal experience allows him to draw parallels between building, destruction, “and the despair and yet resiliency of their exiled inhabitants.” By using building decay as a metaphor, he is both observing and making comments on the current state of rapid technological transformation.
Hariri sees the irony in this situation that within the ruins there is a path to true essence of progress. Amir Hariri was born in Tehran and emigrated to the United States to attend college. He has professional degrees in design management from Cornell and Harvard University. For a decade he worked in design projects ranging from airports, stadiums, concert halls, and museums to award winning glass designs such as stairs for various Apple Stores. He studied print and print making at the Art Students League where he was a teacher’s assistant and became a member of the board of directors. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally included in various public and private collections in the United States as well as Italy, Spain, Hong Kong and Japan. Recent awards include selection as one of Smack Mellon ‘Hot Picks’, the Museum of Arts and Design residency and the 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Drawing from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Leonard Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1926. After serving in WWII, he returned to Brooklyn, New York City and started drawing and painting. Primarily self-taught, he still caroused and intermingled with the best of those days at The Cedar Tavern and often exhibited with the same artists. The energy of the bold charcoal drawings of the cityscape echo the combustion of a developing city. Leonard Rosenfeld spent all of his life creating his art. Some of this 1950’s work was exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, and later he was to have many exhibitions to his credit including Martha Jackson Gallery, OK Harris, La MaMa and Knitting Factory in New York City. Leonard Rosenfeld’s work has been exhibited in The New Britain Museum of Art, and is part of many private collections.