Opening at Packer Schopf Gallery
Robert Horvath / Monica Rezman / Jennifer Yorke
Reception Friday, January 10th    5 - 8 PM

Monica Rezman Robert Horvath Jennifer Yorke


Happy New Year to you and yours! For our first show of the new winter season, we are exhibiting some exciting and vibrant abstraction. On the upstairs level, we juxtapose Robert Horvath’s organic, glossy and meticulous paintings and ceramics with Monica Rezman’s more matte, linear drawings and constructions with geometric and color elements. In our downstairs, we have newcomer Jennifer Yorke. Her collages utilize familiar advertising and editorial visuals and combines them in odd and unexpected ways. Happily obscure!

Robert Horvath / Excitotoxisms / paintings/sculpture
Robert Horvath's fifth solo show at Packer Schopf expands his vision with work in a new medium. While continuing to paint organic and geometric light abstractions, and also harkening back to the early portraiture, the new body of slip-cast glazed porcelain sculpture adds to the complex oeuvre. Porcelain is used for both functional and sculptural forms. In Horvath's hands the refined clay is used for exquisite detail and fired to a high polish, treated with brilliant glazes with reflective luster, matching his nuanced color sensibility. Essentially, it's a perfect material in which to realize his vision in three dimensions. The creation and fabrication signifies the next step of the development of Horvath's vision. Through ceramics and painting, two very traditional artistic forms, he addresses consumption and decadence. Though not always obvious, the seductive aspects of all his work manifest visually theidea of desire. The new medium also marks an important turning point in his practice - where the sculptural forms will be made as works of art in their own right without being created as models for the paintings

Monica Rezman / The Pollen Path / drawings/constructions
Building upon her sustained investigation of hair as a substance linked to rituals of femininity and the beauty industry, Monica Rezman’s recent body of work treats her signature motif in a more abstract manner. Hair, in these new works, is the basis for ruminations on organic processes, the nature of creativity, and the language of gestural abstraction. In her previous drawings the dark strands are isolated against a blank background, (and) in the current works they expand to fill the sheet, proliferating alongside colored shapes, patterns, and streamers. In certain passages, the hair itself becomes an armature for colored facets, like the leading of stained glass. The result is optical confusion, whereby the hair is at once outline and object, appearing alternately in front of the colored forms or fused with them.

Unlike the open lacework of hair that fills the works on paper, the canvases titled Algeny depict closed forms that might be read as organisms of sorts, cobbled together from fragments of Rezman’s hair drawings and painted shapes. The stacks of polygons in Rezman’s Algeny paintings take on sculptural dimensions in her most recent works, migrating from the flat space of the canvas to the real space of the room. Variously painted solid colors or sprouting snarled masses of charcoal hair, Rezman’s new paper constructions appear as prototypes of some mysterious creature with both robotic and organic components. These hairy, geometric figures are almost always upright and composed of at least three segments, which might stand for a head, thorax, and tail.
Excerpted from the recent essay New Work by Antonia Pocock

Jennifer Yorke / TWERKS ON PAPER / collage
Fashion! Food! Sex! Death! Through her Twerks on Paper, Jennifer Yorke laughs at them all. In Yorke’s collages, the failures and flaws of the body assert themselves over the seductive veneer of beauty and propriety created by both costume and custom. Despite our best efforts to create controlled, socially appropriate selves, our bodies are often filled with unruly desires, and only imperfectly contain the sticky, the smelly and the wet. Yorke demonstrates the absurdity of our efforts at control through humor - and the humors that seep and spurt out of her fashionable figures. Yorke conflates fashion’s celebration and distortion of the body with our more day-to-day experience of its flaws, failures and expellants, and encourages us to shake our asses at them.

Artists’ Reception: Friday, January 10th, 5 – 8 PM



Packer Schopf Gallery    942 W. Lake St Chicago, IL 60607    www.packergallery.com

Exhibition Run: January 10 - February 15     Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00am to 5:30pm

Contact Aron Packer at [email protected]    Phone: 312.226.8984    Fax: 312.432.1235