Visions of Night
Nocturnes, a group show featuring six diverse painters, goes on view Thursday, February 11, at the Nabi Gallery in Chelsea. Introducing two who are new to the space, David Geiser and Han Hong Park, the show also includes work by Albert Fayngold, Simon Gaon, Dae Woong Nam, and the late Giglio Dante. It opens with a reception February 11 from 6 to 8 and remains on view through March 20. The gallery is at 137 West 25th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6.
David Geiser, Silver Cenote, oil, leaf, mixed media on board, 120x100, 1998-2007
The paintings in Nocturnes, while sharing a moody, dream-like quality, span a variety of styles from the naturalistic to the expressionist and abstract. 's mixed-media creations are non-representational but evoke totemic or organic forms. The artist, who started out drawing underground comics in the 1970s, has shown his paintings at numerous art venues on the East and West Coasts. He lives and works in East Hampton, Long Island.Han Hong Park is a young Korean artist now living in New Jersey who has shown at galleries and museums in Korea, China, and the US. His canvases explore--sometimes with a touch of the surreal--the luminous and reflective qualities of city streets in the rain.
Han Hong Park, Rain #5, oil on canvas, 24x24, 2009's expressionistic scenes of city lights and fires at sea have often appeared at the Nabi as well as at galleries in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Having spent many of his formative years in Paris, he now lives and paints on the Upper West Side and on Shelter Island. , a poet and critic as well as a painter, is a native of Kiev who now divides his time between that city and Brooklyn. In his misty street scenes, memories of Europe mingle with impressions of New York in a visionary melding of Old World and New.
is a Korean artist who spent the earlier part of this decade in New York as, in effect, the Nabi's artist in residence, painting in a studio space downstairs from the gallery, where he experimented in a variety of styles, often nocturnal and surreal. He now lives in Inchon, Korea, and has been showing at art spaces in Seoul. Giglio Dante was born in Rome, the son of a muralist who trained him from an early age in painting and sculpture, and as a teenager moved with his family to Boston, where he had his first one-man show in 1944. Prominently exhibited and reviewed in New York in the 1960s, he later moved to East Hampton and showed at eastern Long Island galleries, including the Nabi's former space in Sag Harbor. His work often combined geometric elements with classical female profiles, to quasi-mystical effect. He died in 2006.
Giglio Dante, Meditation Passage, acrylic on canvas, 68x68, 1989
