Following Libby’s great post on the BFA show up at Art Making Machine Studios I thought I’d run a word or two about the BFA show I saw at Tyler Hall a few weeks back. Our student, Alan Prazniak was in that show.
Postcard for BFA show at Tyler. Alan’s work is on the right, and Kati’s is bottom left and Paul’s is top left.
The show, with works by Kati Gegenheimer, Paul DeMuro and Alan Prazniak paired two makers of abstract art (Kati and Paul) with someone who’s working figuratively and mining literary sources. Apart from the show’s setting in the less than stellar venue of Tyler Hall’s l-shaped hallway outside the Dean’s office, the show was a good one. Nicely made works hung with thought and some care.
I don’t know Kati and Paul since they weren’t in our class, so don’t know how this body represented their thoughts and ideas. The works were colorful, playful and I enjoyed them.
But I was very curious about what Alan had pulled off since at the end of our semester with him he had just broken with one body of works (based on photographs of sports figures in groups–very nice work and he actually sold a big piece) and moved to a much less safe material — working from his imagination using interiorized understandings of literary sources or places and people in his life.
What I saw in the new works is that Alan had pushed it and moved the work into a kind of meta-biblical, William Blakean realm. The works in the show are ambitious, and considering today’s vogue for teen sketchbook art, boldly oners. The combination of outsidery cartoon sensibility with bible or epic story telling, high Romanticism and maybe a little bit of politics ala Max Beckmann and Jorg Immendorff was pretty great. Needless to say, I loved them.
Kati wrote me to say that she’s in another short BFA show, Senior Printmaking, and this one is at the Crane Building tomorrow, May 5 with an opening 5;30-8 pm. Crane Godfather Richard Hricko is the senior printmakers’ professor, and according to Kati there are several openings at Crane that night.
Alan Prazniak’s pugnacious painting
See pictures at my flickr set which, alas, is a little short on Kati and Paul’s works. But you can see Kati’s works at her blog and see Paul’s works at his blog.
Very many congratulations to all the graduating students everywhere!!
