FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KIM PIOTROWSKI: SWELLINGS
SEPTEMBER 8 – OCTOBER 14, 2006
Opening Reception for the artist: Friday, September 8, 2006, 5:00 – 8:00pm

Skestos Gabriele Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its first solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Kim Piotrowski on Friday, September 8, 2006. This exhibition will include a selection of new paintings and drawings executed between 2005 and 2006.

In her vibrant, elegant paintings, Piotrowski combines elements of Abstract Expressionism, graphic art, and pop culture to create compositions that investigate the practice of painting, while simultaneously addressing personal and universal issues in contemporary society. For the artist, the creative process of painting allows her to investigate formal issues related to the art form, such as color, line and form, while simultaneously contemplating social and political themes including war, disease, love and loss. These paintings are the public manifestations of the artist’s personal meditations.

Piotrowski questions perception and how we process images by unifying opposing systems in her paintings. By juxtaposing gestural brushstrokes and impasto layers of color with flat areas and calligraphic lines of paint, the artist activates her compositions, in order to destabilize the overall surface quality of the paintings. The result is an intentional shift between foreground and background, as forms appear to recede and advance within the paintings. In much of her work, the artist employs the visual vocabulary of organic, biomorphic forms that are rendered with a synthetic color palette of acrylic paint. Natural elements, such as water and plant life, are also portrayed in bold, unnatural hues. Using source material from the media, such as the internet and newspapers, as well as from children’s books, and cartoons, the artist uses representational images that she carefully obscures and transforms into abstracted movements of color and shape. This practice allows Piotrowski to suggest the subject without clearly defining what is being expressed. In this way, the artist encourages the viewer to find their own meaning in the images that she presents.

Piotrowski was formally trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her work has been exhibited in various museums throughout the country, including the Ukranian Museum of Modern Art and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, the McLean County Arts Center in Bloomington, Illinois and the Davenport Museum of Art in Davenport, Iowa. Her paintings have also been shown at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Evanston Art Center.

For more information please contact the gallery at 312.243.1112 or info@skestosgabriele.com. Gallery hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11:00am – 6:00pm, Saturday 12:00 – 5:00 pm.