Leon Tarasewicz
February 23-April 14, 2001
Paintings and Installation
The Gary Tatinisian Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition
of work by Leon Tarasewicz, who has been selected to represent
Poland at this year’s Venice Biennale. A series of smaller
paintings, as well as an installation comprised of six partitions
which reflect the gallery’s architecture and have been
painted in situ, will be on view until March 31.
Tarasewicz has long been recognized as one of the outstanding
abstract painters of his generation. For Tarasewicz, life is
equated with art, and painting with experience. The primary
place where his life and painting converge is Walily, in the
Bialystok region of northeastern Poland, where the artist was
born and continues to live and work. Although he travels regularly
to Warsaw to take in the cultural phenomena of the metropolis
where he completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in
1984 and has been a professor since 1996, Tarasewicz’s
work is clearly rooted in his native landscape. With nature
as his source of inspiration, his paintings record his responses
as both a neutral observer and subjective narrator. It is not
the landscape per se that he represents, but the underlying
structure of natural phenomena, which he translates into a densely
layered paint surface, most characteristically applied in stripes
of contrasting color with blurred edges. Shadows of tree trunks
become a series of vertical lines; furrows of plowed fields,
a progression of converging lines; stumps of newly felled trees,
a pattern of dashes.
If, as one author has remarked, Tarasewicz’s is an almost
physiological need to paint, then his work is only superficially
related to gesture painting or abstract expressionism, just
as it is also related to constructivist and colorist traditions.
That he strives to represent the sensuality and tactility of
surface and color, as well as essential structures, in addition
to his own spiritual encounters with the nature, is not a contradiction,
because this multiplicity reflects a more nuanced interaction
with the world in general. The most convincing realization of
the complexity of Tarasewicz’s work is found in his installations,
which both embrace and overwhelm the viewer, suggesting that
nature – and art – can be a sublime experience. Regardless
of whether the viewer knows the landscape that has inspired
the installation, the experience is deeply physical. For this
installation, the artist has expanded upon the existing architecture
of the gallery to create an environment that conveys a sense
of ceremony and procession in the spacing and symmetry of its
units. The shift in tonality from a deep blue to a vibrant yellow
as the viewer moves through space suggests the compression of
time and constant renewal experienced between sunset and sunrise
For more information contact theGary Tatintsian Gallery
525 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212 633 0110 e-mail:
info@tatintsian.com
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on images to enlarge |
| Installations |
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Installation
view |
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Installation,
2001
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| Paintings |
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Untitled,
2001 (series of three paintings)
Oil on canvas
20 x 20 inches (each) |
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Untitled
painting, 1997
Oil on canvas
74.5 x 102 inches |
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Untitled
painting, 2001
Oil on canvas
74.5 x 51 inches |
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Untitled
painting, 2001
Oil on canvas
74.5 x 51 inches (one panel of two) |
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Untitled
painting, 2001
Oil on canvas
74.5" X 51" |
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Untitled,
2001
Oil on canvas
74.5" X 51" |
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