Painting in Four Takes at the Aldrich Museum of Art

The last one hundred years have witnessed the explosion of virtually every available means and medium in the service of art making, yet painting has not only maintained a central position in visual art, but has also adapted creatively to rapid changes in our culture as a whole. Today, painting is embedded in the broad debate of actual vs. virtual, and its ability to balance what is illusive and what is real, what is tactile and what is optical, and what is emotive and what is formal, providing fertile ground for a diverse range of artists.

Steve DiBenedetto, Metacopter, 2003, Collection of Kevin Bruk, Miami, Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery, New York

This fall, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, will present Painting in Four Takes, a series of solo exhibitions that will provide a window into the practices of four engaging painters who imbue the medium with relevance and character. The series, on view from November 15, 2015, through April 3, 2016, will mark the first time in over twenty years that The Aldrich has dedicated all of its galleries to painting.

The four artists selected span generations, methods, and intentions, but all are deeply entrenched in what painting is and can be in the image-dominated atmosphere of our twenty-first century. The artists include: Steve DiBenedetto, Hayal Pozanti and Julia Rommel.

Steve DiBenedetto (b. 1958, Bronx, New York) has established himself as an idiosyncratic artist who has brought the pursuit of painting into the unpredictable chaos and flux that categorize the Post-Modern world. Evidence of Everything is his first major solo museum exhibition. 

Julia Rommel, Day with 7 Walks, 2015
Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York

The practice of Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) spans painting, digital animation, and sculpture. For her first solo museum exhibition, she will debut a new series of paintings and digital animations. Pozanti negotiates two opposing image-producing interfaces, the digital, with its mechanical, frenetic pace, and traditional studio practice, with its slowness, imperfection, and tactile insistence. To do so, she has invented “Instant Paradise”: a thirty-one-character “alphabet,” which she uses to generate shapes that never repeat themselves, nor have a recognizable equivalent in visual culture. 

Hayal Pozanti, micro-micro, 2014
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

For her first solo museum exhibition, Julia Rommel (b. 1980, Salisbury, Maryland) will debut a series of new paintings presented alongside small works from 2010–2012. Rommel’s oil paintings range from head to body size, and oscillate between cool and warm palettes, color fields of denim blues, moody greys, creamy whites, salmon pinks, and citrus hues.

For more information visit www.aldrichart.org