Enigmatic Visions
A sense of mystery pervades the three-artist show on view through January 29, 2005. It introduces Korean artist Dae-Woong Nam to New York viewers while also displaying new work by Giglio Dante, a distinguished painter who has been active since the 1940s. Enigmatic prints by Nohra Barros round out the show.
Giglio Dante was born in Rome, the son of a muralist who trained him from an early age in painting and sculpture. As a teenager he moved to Boston with his family and began making a name for himself as an artist. His first one-man show was in 1944 and was followed by many others in Boston, New York, and East Hampton, L.I., where he has lived since 1981.
Over the years Dante has worked in a variety of forms, including the plaster bas-reliefs that will be sampled at the Nabi in a subsequent show. The current exhibit includes six large acrylics that combine his classical training with an exuberant, modern sensibility in images of mysterious faces amid flower-like forms and abstract, geometric elements.
Giglio Dante, La Veneziana, acrylic on canvas, 60x48, 2004
Nohra Barros, born in Colombia and now living in Sagaponack, L.I., is showing small etchings and watercolors that carry an aura of poetry and magic. Their enigmatic human and animal figures, situated in exotic landscapes, are often renderings of scenes from works by favorite writers such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Patricia Highsmith.
Nohra Barros, Indiscretion, etching, 4x6
Dae-Woong Nam is a younger artist who studied in Korea and New York and now lives and works here. His oil paintings are suffused with a powerful mood of portent and expectation. Their imagery is dreamlike, reminiscent of the German Romanticism of Friedrich and Böcklin but with a contemporary edge. Often it includes groups of red-clad figures, posed as if waiting or searching for something, amid dark waters or snowy mountains and forests. Sometimes these figures wear the face of the artist himself, morphing from canvas to canvas like the Trickster or the Monkey King.
Dae-Woong Nam, Untitled, oil on canvas, 46x62, 2004