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Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer -
The remarkable sculptures created by German artist Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer powerfully express an energetic gravity and intensity heightened by their archaic appearance. Adorned with tribal headdresses and medallions, these figures are the vessels of a sacred knowledge, seeking to transport the viewer to an elevated awareness. "These figures are totemic in aspect and the narratives are indirect and internal. The stories they contain are in fact archetypal ones and require an effort of self-recognition and serious introspection on the part of the viewer," writes Matthias Ostermann, art critic.
Schnitzenbaumer masterfully blends ceramic and metallic materials, thereby creating surfaces resembling decaying and oxidized metals or raw clay, adding to the archeological aura of each piece. "Schniztenbaumer does not have the inhibitions that many other ceramic artists suffer from. She adds wood and steel with great ease, coloring all the components to look like unfired clay or exposed metal. The reason is this: she is not making statements about ceramics or about clay as a material, as potters love to do, but about the poetic quality of ancient forms," comments Donald Locke, regular contributor to Creative Loafing.
Gabriele Schnitzenbaumer has exhibited throughout Germany, France, and the United States, including numerous shows with the Bill Lowe Gallery since 1992. She was an art professor at Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich, Germany for 10 years.
Hyunmee Lee -
Korean-born abstract painter Hyunmee Lee masterfully couples bold, expressive brushstrokes with soft, subdued fields of color, thereby creating a strikingly beautiful balance in composition and design. "Confronting the paintings of Hyunmee Lee, what impresses is their celebration of gesture and depiction of a nearly unlimited sense of space. Abstract and intuitively painterly, her aesthetic is one of immediacy perpetually seeking its own nature," writes Jim Edwards in the catalogue Intimacy Without Restraint: The Gesture Paintings of Hyunmee Lee.
Hyunmee Lee's spontaneous yet deliberate brushstrokes pay homage to her early training in calligraphy during her childhood in Korea. Her use of line is distinctly calligraphic - not only in its pure and crisp execution, but also in its philosophical and artistic intentions. "I have always been more interested in the substance of the brush stroke than its symbolism; I am concentrating on spontaneous gestures," Hyunmee Lee writes. "My work is a contemplation of the spirit as it embarks on to the canvas and a conscious and unconscious step toward "Big Mind," the Buddhist concept of meditation resulting in a Zen-like form of enlightenment and connectedness to nature and the universe."
In addition to showing with the Bill Lowe Gallery, Hyunmee Lee's work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Seoul, Korea, and Sydney, Australia. She earned an MFA in the Visual Arts through the University of Sydney in Australia, and a BFA in Painting from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. Hyunmee Lee is a professor of art at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah.
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Sam Glankoff -
Inventor of a unique printmaking technique termed 'print-painting,' Sam Glankoff was an intensely private individual who chose not to publicly exhibit his work for decades. At the age of 87, he had his first one-person show held at the Graham Gallery in New York in October 1981. Glankoff died in April 1982, six months after his Graham exhibition. Yet he lived to experience his work being exhibited next to Robert Motherwell's and Helen Frankenthaler's at a show curated by Gene Baro for the Brooklyn Museum, to read a review of his work by John Russell, and to participate in a documentary film on his life and art. By the end of his life, his work transformed from archaic elemental shapes and Zen-infused circles to emotive primordial figures. He had reemerged into the world and witnessed its celebration of him.
His unique process, called 'print-painting,' (the term being invented by Elke Solomon, former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art), was developed through years of experimentation with paper size and densities, various methods of applying and drying the pigment, and was finally perfected with the application of casein, which served to harden the ink and extend his color palette. In this process Glankoff was able to control the absorbency of the paper, so the panels received layer after layer of color.
"Like monotypes, they are unique transfer prints but, as in painting, there is an excessive importance associated with the application of the pigment," states David Kiehl, former Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
"'Print-Painting' is really an invention of Glankoff's," writes Jeffrey Wechsler, curator of Sam Glankoff's retrospective exhibition held in 1984. "It's rather remarkable that in the late 20th century an artist could really come up with an entirely new technique. Certainly it was based on other techniques. But it had specific qualities and characteristics which Glankoff, through his great experience with the medium, realized had to come together in an entirely new form."
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