NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Michael Victor ª MVR in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
The largest of Michael Victor ª MVR’s digital paintings, derived from artworks he paints with hard pastels and then scans, are experiments in a kind of Post-Impressionism. Instead of small markings of paint, MVR’s landscapes develop instead from ‘found pixels’ in the image – tiny gridded color squares that make up scanned (now ‘rasterized’) artwork.
Distinct pixel arrangements of patterns, which develop into unique textures and color effects, serve as ‘raw material’ for painting. This raw material can vary drastically from one work to another. Throughout MVR’s ‘pixel painting’, a surging psychic quality binds intricate tessellations together; in his most advanced works, vast interrelated elements render them spatially eloquent.
Comparable to Seurat’s Pointillism, the artist engages both his palette and the spatial breadths of his landscapes on their own terms, confronting his paintings with questions to be answered through his process of close-up investigation, discovery, and interpretation of ‘found’ pixels. A final interpretation is given through the selection of paper with specific visual qualities, enhancing and reinforcing content.
The result is an organic, gestural response to the incessant stream of pixels delivered by 21st century digital mass media; a priori realities saturated with natural, often fantastic textures and colors simulate the sky, land, water, trees, and built features in familiar environments that are cherished by us all. In this way, the atmosphere of MVR’s work becomes electrified with an over vitality, felt from the painted works’ broad, sweeping strokes down to the most minute and exact pixel configurations.
Exhibition Dates: March 13 - April 3, 2018
Reception: Thursday March 15, 2018 6-8 PM
Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11:00am – 6:00pm
Gallery Location: 530 West 25th Street, New York, NY
Event URL: https://www.agora-gallery.com/artistpage/MVR.aspx
Featured Artists:
Ellen Cuylaerts | Elena Gastón Nicolás | Daniel Loveridge | Zie Otto | Michael Victor ª MVR | Franck Sastre
About the Exhibition
Encounters: Nature and Culture
Encounters: Nature and Culture features six artists whose works highlight the underlying presence of subjectivity in all objective understanding. Starting with the depiction of realistic figures — be these painted or photographed — each work shows us how the hand of the artist ineluctably deviates from purely factual descriptions, delineating a world of imagined truth.
Fleeting Worlds: Wildlife Photography from Ellen Cuylaerts
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Ellen Cuylaerts in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
Ghosts of the Natural World: The Paintings of Elena Gastón Nicolás
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Elena Gastón in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
Zie Otto: Portraiture and Iconography
NEW YORK, NY – Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of Zie Otto in Encounters: Nature and Culture. The exhibition opens March 13, 2018 and runs through April 3, 2018 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 15 from 6-8 pm.
