Abstract Illusionism: Two Poetic Painters

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Stanford Art Spaces is pleased to announce two May-June 2015 solo shows by eminent West Coast oil painters: We Will Never Not Have Been by Seattle painter and teacher Jamie Bollenbach; and Numinous, by Oakland painter Yari Ostovany. With the J.M.W. Turner Painting Set Free show coming to the de Young Museum on June 20, this is an ideal time to consider artists who share the English Romantic’s interest in capturing mood and atmosphere with color and gesture freed from restrictive naturalism and realism, and aspiring to the shock and awe of the Sublime. The term Abstract Illusionism was used in the 1970s and 1980s to describe a kind of contemporary trompe-l’oeil, fool-the-eye paintings; realistic shading and pictorial space were employed for abstract expressionist paint blobs and drips, creating a kind of hybrid of abstract and realist art. I use the term here to suggest the dual nature of these works, hovering between abstraction and representation....  Please read the rest of the text at Facebook.com/StanfordArtSpaces