Irvine Contemporary presents two concurrent exhibitions Picture Planes, an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and installations by Robert Mellor and Alexa Meade, and Gaia: The Urban Romantic, an exhibition of new works on panel and installations by Gaia.
In Picture Planes, Robert Mellor and Alexa Meade disrupt established genres by playing on the expectations of the picture plane and representational space in both painting and photography. Opening reception with the artists: Saturday, June 19, 6-8 PM.
Robert Mellor has been developing a new body of work with ever more complex planes of space and compositional layers that reference landscape imagery, Japanese woodcuts, and multiple approaches to abstraction in highly original combinations. Mellor composes multi-layered paintings in acrylic in which the space of the painting is fractured through visibly cut overlapping planes. His new paintings expand on his use of multiple planes and layers of space in figurative abstraction works that combine ground layers of ink and acrylic washes on which the multiple layers of acrylic, representing multiple genres and styles, are imposed in sharp relief. (Artist’s resume. Image gallery.)
New Irvine Contemporary gallery artist Alexa Meade will present a series of her recent photographs of unique portraits executed by painting directly on a subject’s body and clothing to render unexpectedly flattened three-dimensional figures in composed sets or staged in real world locations. Alexa Meade’s photographs are at once records of a performance, a portrait session, and a reflection on three- and two-dimensional representational spaces. Meade calls attention to the expectations of representational space in the picture plane through displacements in medium: she presents not simply photography and painting as instances of two-dimensional picture planes, but transforms painted bodies and objects by presenting them as cohabitating within three-dimensional photographic space.
Alexa Meade will also create an onsite installation for composing a series of live portraits that she will photograph and exhibit weekly during the exhibition.
Image: Robert Mellor, Parted, 2010. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 24 X 30 in. Detail
Irvine Contemporary
1412 14th St., NW
Washington, DC 20005
202-332-8767
irvinecontemporary.com
