‟Electromagnetic Signature” is a colaboration between Kiwha Lee and Julia Kunin, a mixed medium artwork using painting and sculpture. (Photo courtesy of Mindy Solomon Gallery)
Three new exhibitions opened this week at Mindy Solomon Gallery and will be on view through Saturday, Oct. 10 at the gallery in Allapattah.
Kiwha Lee and Julia Kunin's “Electromagnetic Signature,” Matt Phillips' “Falling Tide Can Turn” and Ernesto García Sánchez's “Acoples (Couplings)” explore ideas ranging from perception and space to transformation, abstraction and the physical process of making art.
In “Electromagnetic Signature,” Lee and Kunin bring together painting and sculpture in an exhibition centered on the relationship between material objects and information that cannot necessarily be seen. Lee, who is exhibiting at Mindy Solomon Gallery for the first time, uses paint, pattern, texture and layers to challenge traditional ideas about pictorial space.
“What if painting isn’t a window through which an autonomous spectator looks, but a permeable structure where seeing becomes an exchange between viewer, image, light, and space?” Lee writes in the artist's statement.
Julia Kunin's ‟Alarm Clock.”
Her paintings draw on Korean and Chinese traditions of pictorial space and historic Asian printmaking processes, which she reinterprets through oil on canvas. Pattern becomes more than decoration, instead acting as a way to interrupt and reshape the viewer's understanding of surface and depth.
Kunin, returning to the gallery for her second exhibition, approaches those ideas through sculpture. Her new works combine personal symbols, surrealism and references to decorative arts, with forms that bring together the body, architecture and machine.
“In creating feminist and queer sculptures that reference the figure, I combine personal symbols with surrealism,” says Kunin as part of the artist's statement. “The glitter and iridescence of the femme fatale have been transformed into a gender-fluid warrior.”
Phillips takes a different route into questions of change with “Falling Tide Can Turn,” his third solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist works with transparent layers and pure pigment, creating abstract paintings in which shapes can appear to move between solid forms and the spaces surrounding them.
‟Breathing Through” from Kiwha Lee, where she explores surrealism, colors and shapes. (Photo courtesy of Mindy Solomon Gallery)
“These new paintings have an internal restlessness,” says Phillips on the website Mindysolomon.com. “Some days, when I came into the studio, they seemed close to being pictures of forms that could be named in clear terms. On other days, these same images appeared to embody actions that unfold through time—they moved, supported, bent, floated, and unfurled.”
That sense of movement becomes central to the exhibition. Phillips describes a process in which shapes and patterns can disappear only to re-emerge in another form, suggesting that change does not necessarily mean loss.
“Making these paintings has often reminded me that everything shifts over time, and that change itself can be an opportunity to marvel at something in the process of becoming,” he says. “Even the falling tide can turn.”
Ernesto García Sánchez's “Acople 5" is part of “Acoples (Couplings)” at Mindy Solomon Gallery. (Photo courtesy of Mindy Solomon Gallery)
Sánchez's “Acoples (Couplings)” brings the idea of transformation directly into the physical construction of the artwork. The Mexico-based Cuban artist is presenting his fourth exhibition with the gallery and third solo exhibition there, continuing his investigation of line, geometry, abstraction and the construction of space.
Sánchez begins each work as a painting. Once the painting is complete, however, he cuts it apart and reconstructs it, using the process to challenge the idea that an artwork reaches a final resolution when the original composition is finished.
An untitled painting from Matt Phillips, silica and pigment on canvas.
The artist says that the current exhibition is "part of an investigation," one that he has been developing in recent years around painting geometry, and the construction of space.
“Each piece begins as a painting. Once completed, I cut it apart and reconstruct it to explore a new internal logic and discover relationships that were not present in its initial resolution,” Sánchez says.
For Sánchez, the act of cutting and rebuilding becomes part of the artwork itself. Drawing, painting, cutting, shifting and reconstruction all become connected, while the resulting works move between painting, object, surface and volume.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Electromagnetic Signature, Kiwha Lee and Julia Kunin, "Falling Tides Can Turn," Matt Phillips, and Ernesto García Sánchez “Acoples (Couplings)”
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and by appointment. Through Saturday, Oct. 10.
WHERE: Mindy Solomon Gallery, 848 NW 22nd St., Miami
MORE INFORMATION: www.mindysolomon
