205 Housatonic St. / Lenox, MA 01240
Gallery Boreas presents three artists’ new paintings and photographs. They focus the viewer on an intense or idealized states of mind and body.
Birgir Snæbjörn Birgisson, of Reykjavík,
creates idealizations of Miss World crown bearers. With a sinister stroke,
beauty queens become blond and blue-eyed (even those that were not so
in real life). The five oil on paper portraits presented in “Hyper
States,” depicting Miss World winners from 1951-1955, are from an
ambitious project to paint portraits on large canvas of all the Miss Worlds.
The full series will be exhibited in November this year at the Kjarvalstadir
museum in Reykjavik. Mr. Birgisson exhibited in Pittsfield twice in the
summer of 2006: a solo exhibit of the “Blond Heads Nordic Race”
series of 1920’s German aryan pedigrees, and “Blond JFK”
in a group show.
Peter Finnemore’s “Silent Screams”
is a series of digital photographs on banners, one of which will be presented
in Lenox. Within the existential tradition of Edvard Munch, Mr. Finnemore
explores pain and endless conflict on a global scale. In photographs sourced
from around the world, background context is removed, revealing the high
velocity intense visual pitch of human anxiety. Finnemore’s 32-film
2005 video installation, Project Jedi, has been exhibited in full by Gallery
Boreas and in an abridged version at the Welsh pavilion of the Venice
Biennale in 2005. The artist lives in Wales.
David Pierce, of Brooklyn, has painted a series of portraits
of George W. Bush appearing as a vulnerable youthful pawn, caught up in
the gritty tattoo culture of prison gangs. Presently numbering seven works,
the completed series of eight paintings will represent the eight years
that President Bush has been in office. With every passing “year,”
the number and intensity of the tattoos increases while the blank gaze
on the youthful face remains the same. Consistently addressing themes
of identity, nationality, and anonymity, Mr. Pierce’s video work
and ink drawings were most recently presented in last season’s video
art reception series in Lenox and at the “Northbound” exhibit
in Pittsfield.
Hyper States will form the basis for a large part of Gallery Boreas’
presentation at the Bridge Art Fair in London, from October 11-14, 2007.
Gallery Boreas is a migratory international contemporary arts promoter
exhibiting in Lenox and Pittsfield in the summer months and internationally
the rest of the year.
205 Housatonic St. / Lenox, MA 01240
For more information, contact Scott Laugenour:
917 743 6548
scott@galleryboreas.com
more information on the artists: