“Under Construction: Dimensional Interludes” and “Vintage City Drawings

“Under Construction: Dimensional Interludes” and “Vintage City Drawings - 1950’s” Exhibition

Denise Bibro Fine Art

This event has ended.

The streets of New York are riveted with barricades, construction cones, and massive machinery. The skyline is darted with installations of steel grids, concrete planes, cranes, cement trucks and top hats everywhere. The busy construction is almost 24/7 in a city that never sleeps.

The constantly evolving topography of the city and its surrounding boroughs have been an intrigue and inspiration for artists. While living and working within New York, artists have documented the movement of change in the city, playing an integral role in the growth of change in the city landscape. Areas of Brooklyn, and parts of Manhattan are all places where artists have left an indelible mark. These changes have not only altered the topography but also the economics of the city.

The artists’ work in these two exhibitions illustrate the above. In Gallery II, Leonard Rosenfeld’s strong, powerful charcoal drawings of construction and bold city bridges and structures, illustrate that even during the 1950’s the development of the city was in full swing. This industrial boom of the latter half of the 19th Century was a precursor to the creation of the international powerhouse that is now New York City.

Anne Finkelstein, a native of New York, continues to live and have a studio here. Her work is primarily digital photographic montage or painting of the city landscape. Combining desperate view-points she creates dynamic geometric compositions. Often, the digitally manipulated transition of images creates a unique but still familiar landscape full of asymmetrical and symmetrical elements with juxtaposed shapes that echo the forces, change and movement within the current city structural landscape

Allan Gorman’s work appears very realistic. It is, in fact, abstract. Inspired by the “mysterious and nostalgic power of machines and industry.” He is drawn to hidden abstract patterns and interested in conveying the aesthetic tensions, mood, and interesting designs created by - and within - those objects.

Amir Hariri’s artistic approach is multi-disciplinary combining drawing, painting and sculpture to study specific locations from memory with the goal of capturing passive interactions and exchanges with our built environment. Hariri’s work as a “theatrical backdrop for the examination, notional, weight and austerity, material roughness and more broadly transient systems.”