Pentimenti Gallery is thrilled to open the fall season with The World Around Us, a two-person exhibition by Amy Boone-McCreesh and Azadeh Gholizadeh.

The work in The World Around Us embraces nature, materiality, form, storytelling, and society as an artistic ode to interconnectedness. Prepare to be enchanted by an exquisite display of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper that beautifully touches on all the above.

Amy Boone-McCreesh‘s maximal collages explore class and beauty signifiers from the perspective of gazing out domestic windows. Her depiction of the outdoors and architectural structures are often accompanied by florals and natural elements. Utilizing bold colors and textures (paper, acrylic, and fabric), she challenges notions of taste-making. Boone-McCreesh’s works exude an aspirational quality, joyfully and defiantly extending beyond their frames with unique custom charms. Her art subversively disrupts cultural markers of luxury and mass production through harmoniously clashing over-decoration. Boone-McCreesh's creations encompass many aspects and challenge the viewers with a thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of beauty, environment, and individual expression.

Amy Boone-McCreesh received her BFA at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, PA, and her MFA at Towson University, Baltimore, MD. Her work has been included in exhibitions across the country, notably at the Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Kreeger Museum, Washington DC; ICA, Baltimore, MD; Dinner and Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, NY; The Peale Museum, Baltimore, MD; David B. Smith, Denver, CO, and many more. Her work is published in New American Paintings; Handmade Life, published by Thames and Hudson, and more. She is a two-time recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her work can be found in private and public collections.

Azadeh Gholizadeh draws inspiration from looking out through landscapes that spur memories of her past life in Tehran intertwined with her sense of belonging and her observations of the present locale. She creates imagery assembled with silk, linen, and wool embroidery on canvas mesh. The integral scenes have a pixelated aesthetic embodying absence, distance, desire, and endurance. Her colors are soft and gentle but majestically clash against one another. Gholizadeh invites you to peer at the work through a lens quoted by Simon Schama, “a way of looking; of rediscovering what we already have … instead of being yet another explanation of what we have lost, it is an exploration of what we may find.” She received her BA from School of Architecture and Urban Planning Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, her Master of Architecture and Urbanism, Iran University of Science & Technology, Tehran, Iran, and her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Her work has been included in exhibitions internationally: Museo de Arte de Armenia, Armenia, Colombia; Museo De Arte De Pereira, Pereira, Colombia; Goldfinch, Chicago, IL; Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Chicago, IL; and more. Her recent awards include Chicago Artadia Award; as well as a finalist for Hopper Prize, Chicago Artadia Award, and American Muslim Futures.