Art: Group Exhibition

The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring work by Isabelle Abbot, Will Berry, S Ross Browne, Frederic Crist, Sarah Coote, Charlotte Culot, Jim Dine, Shepard Fairey, Isa Gagarin, Mira Hecht, Sarah Irvin, Kathleen Markowitz, Sarah Mizer, Hullihen Moore, Jaydan Moore, Tim O’Kane, Corey Pemberton, Erling Sjovold, Ryan Syrell, Robert Walz, and Brenda Zappitell. The exhibition runs December 8, 2016 to January 14, 2017.

Isabelle Abbot’s loose, impressionistic paintings pay homage to Virginia’s mountainous countryside. Born and raised near Charlottesville, the artist feels a deep-rooted attachment to the land and turns to painting as a means to cultivate and sustain that relationship. Her work, however, is less about illustrating the picturesque landscape than embodying an instinctive experience of it. Painting en plein air with quick brushstrokes and a vibrant color palette, she strives to capture the essentials of her surroundings: the textures, colors, and topography of the land, the time of day and the changing atmosphere. For Abbot, these are the signifiers that make a particular time in a particular place meaningful, instantiating “the moment when a location becomes significant and takes up residence in our memories.” Her paintings celebrate these ephemeral details, inviting a heightened sense of awareness and attunement with nature.

Abbot received her BA in 2005 from the University of Virginia and her MFA in 2011 from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is currently an adjunct art instructor at UVA and regularly exhibits her work across the region.

Charlotte Culot is an internationally acclaimed artist based in Southern France, whose mixed-media paintings explore dynamic visual relationships between color and texture. Built up in layers of torn Kraft paper, gouache, and other materials, her canvases seem to pulsate with contrasting hues and overlapping shapes. Such dynamic compositions manifest Culot’s aim of turning purely formal properties into “a reservoir of energy, so that each of us is faced with our own vitality.” Indeed, her treatment of color, line, and texture is more intuitive than cerebral, infusing each work with a stimulating, evocative energy. Committed to celebrating her materials’ expressive rather than descriptive potential, Culot embeds layers of feeling, experience, and emotion into her collages and opens them up to endless personal reflection.

Culot was born in Belgium into a family of successful artists. Although she never pursued formal studio training, her art education began at home during childhood and culminated at the University of Louvain, where she earned her BA in 1988. Since the early 1990s, she has shown her work in esteemed galleries throughout Europe and the United States.