New York as "City of Dreams"
Paintings by Simon Gaon and Dae-Woong Nam go on view in City of Dreams, opening at the Nabi Gallery on Thursday, December 15, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
The show,, which will run through January 28, 2006, is the second in a series that began last month with New York Stories, featuring paintings by Kathy Buist and Nick Savides. The third New York show, City Lights, will open February 2 with work by Anna Rochegova and Lewis Zacks.
Simon Gaon is a native New Yorker who lives and paints on the Upper West Side. He has had many exhibits at the Nabi and at the Peter Findlay Gallery in New York, and is especially popular in Europe, with recent one-man shows in Germany and Holland. His canvases, large and swirling with color, evoke a sense of romantic grandeur. Water, roiled by storms or glinting with reflected light, is a favorite theme, and the new show includes a number of studies of New York’s rivers, bays, and bridges.
Brooklyn Bridge, oil on canvas, 36x42, 2002
Where Gaon paints the city as he sees it, rendering it with a passionate intensity and a luxuriant, expressionist technique, Dae-Woong Nam, a young Korean artist who currently lives and works in New York, is more literally a painter of dreams, combing realistic elements of city and nature in startling ways.
This Is Not All Over, oil on panel, 18x18, 2005
A trickster like Magritte, but a romantic like Friedrich and Böcklin, he paints, in meticulous detail, places that just happen to be the scene of some inexplicable drama or catastrophe.
Nothing You Can Fix, oil on panel, 18x18, 2005
