NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Brooklyn artist Yuliya Pogreb in Mélange of Milieu. The exhibition opens February 14, 2017 and runs through March 7, 2017 with an opening reception on Thursday, February 16 from 6-8 pm.
The oversized portraits and still-life paintings of Yuliya Pogreb are masterful representations of light and color, awash in detail. Fascinated by large-format images, Yuliya prefers working with giant canvases because it makes her feel like a five-year-old again, full of wonder, sitting in an echoing blotchy studio in a small Eastern European suburban movie theater and watching for hours how posters for films are being painted by hand triple her size. To achieve precision and accuracy in her paintings, Yuliya works from a photograph, breaking images into tiny squares and then blowing them up following a grid pattern. “It's a building blocks game for a 40-year-old,” she says. Although Yuliya’s work is hyper-realistic and based on photos, she doesn’t consider her paintings photorealistic. Rather, instead of trying to capture how people appear, or their personality, she wants to portray their souls. Because her subjects faces are so large, they demand a psychological exchange between themselves and the viewer, transforming what is not so obvious into something conspicuously beautiful.
Born in Latvia, Yuliya graduated from the Avni Institute of Art And Design in Israel, and worked as a graphic artist and art director for 13 years. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Exhibition Dates: February 14, 2017 – March 7, 2017
Reception: Thursday, February 16, 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11-6
Gallery Location: 530 West 25th St, Chelsea, New York
Event URL: http://www.agora-gallery.com/artistpage/Yuliya_Pogreb.aspx
Featured Artists:
Mélange of Milieu
Anna Voloshko | MORLOT Claude | Doris Brown | Yuliya Pogreb | HERMINE | Sa Peng | Yoshiko Kanai | Rita Galambos | Stacie Hernandez | Michael Alberon
About the Exhibition
Mélange of Milieu: Defying Category
This February Agora Gallery presents Mélange of Milieu, a group exhibition highlighting the newest ways to bend genre practiced by artists working today. The eight featured artists hail from the Ukraine, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and the United States - among others - yet have much to say to each other. The hazy, Impressionistic landscape paintings on one wall seem to both inform and take cues from the brash figural paintings on the next. Mélange of Milieu is unique in the current crop of gallery shows for featuring sculpture as prominently as painting, or indeed any works on paper. The exhibition makes a conscious effort to include a range of three-dimensional works, the result being an unusually revealing look at the field. There are highly realistic bronze figurines of invented animals, sleek and gestural depictions of the moving body in stone, and assemblages of brightly colored wooden blocks that have been both painted and embroidered, in a way, to evoke the patterns of the cosmos.
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