Five Abstract Visions’ Opens October 2nd at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries

“Five Abstract Visions,” the new exhibition at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in downtown Coral Gables, offers a fascinating view of how accomplished mid-career artists approach abstraction in very different ways.

“Each of these artists have been exhibited in museums and are included in some of the nation’s most important collections,” said gallery owner and director Virginia Miller. “Each has spent years perfecting a highly personal technique and offers a unique visual statement.” Michelle Concepción’s paintings have been described as “soft, dreamy shapes that appear to be floating in deep space or a bottomless abyss—visual meditations that invite the mind to wander among them.”

Her astonishing technique, demonstrated in a video being shown during the exhibition, creates a dramatic impression of depth despite the flat surfaces of her paintings.

Florian Depenthal chanced upon a supply of fluorescent pigments and he’s been mixing his unique colors with them ever since. A glider pilot, the German artist says some of his works are inspired by his airborne glimpses of the reflecting and absorbent planes of the earth’s surface.

Depenthal enjoys visiting the Florida Keys, and other paintings have been based upon the constantly changing colors of the foliage and sea with the passage of sunshine, passing clouds and thunderstorms.

Aaron Karp’s multihued, mosaic-like surfaces shimmer with motion through his masterful use of the push and pull characteristics of myriad colors. Some of his patterns were inspired by the tiled domes of the various palaces and towers of the Alhambra complex in Spain.

Karp’s dozens of exhibitions include solo shows at the Albuquerque Museum, the Amarillo Museum, and the fine arts galleries of Duke University and the State University of New York at Albany as well as some of the nation’s leading private art galleries. He has received numerous awards and honors since 1981. His ten residencies at prestigious artists’ colonies include one at Fundación Valparaiso, Mojacar, Spain. He recently was awarded a residency in April 2010 at Can Serrat, the artists’ enclave at El Bruc, Spain.

For more than twenty years, Andy Moses has worked to perfect the extraordinary combinations of aerospace paints that he uses to create his light-refracting paintings. On first glance, one of his concave paintings appears to be a simple variation of a blue stripe on a sleek indigo background. When the light source is changed the painting segues into a luminous pearlescent pink.

“It has to be experienced to be appreciated,” says Miller. “Moses’ paintings have a spiritual quality, a suggestion of the infinity of space.

A more traditional approach is taken by Linda Touby, a classical abstract expressionist who studied at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan with the youngest member of the renowned New York School, Richard Pousette-Dart. Some of her works have been compared to those of Mark Rothko.

When ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries gave Pousette-Dart his first retrospective in the south in 1985, Touby came to see the show. She’s been represented by Virginia Miller ever since.

“Linda has explored the subtle relationship of colors and shapes for more than a quarter of a century,” Miller notes. “By troweling one color over another in broad horizontal swaths, broken here and there by scumbled see-through patches that create a kind of purposeful pentimento, Touby even suggests the erosion that time has wrought upon the surfaces of Giotto’s great frescoes,” states critic Ed McCormack.

“Five Abstract Visions” opens from 7 -10 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2 at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries, 169 Madeira Ave., Coral Gables, Greater Miami’s longest-established contemporary fine art gallery. The show will continue through February 2010 and is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday and by appointment. For more information, visit the gallery’s web site, virginamiller.com, or call 305-444-4493.

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