The White Room Gallery Presents "With Abstract Certainty"

Four Artists Execute the Abstract to Perfection

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 22, 2018 from 5-7 p.m.

On View: September 20 to October 22, 2018.

"With Abstract Certainty" explores the abstract in all its beauty and dimension through steel, ink, acrylic and color with works by four inimitable, renowned artists: Kathy Buist, James Leonard, Tanya Minhas and Ryan Schmidt. The exhibition will be on view from September 20 to October 22, 2018 at The White Room Gallery located at 2415 Main Street, Bridgehampton, NY 11932.

For a preview of exhibiting artists in the show, continue to scroll.

KATHY BUIST

Kathy Buist's art has won praise from The New York Times and has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the country, including the Parrish Art Museum in The Hamptons, the National Woman’s Museum Archives in Washington,D.C., Andrews Museum in Andrews, NC and the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, Long Island. She has been a resident artist at centers in Vermont and Virginia and her paintings are part of numerous international private collections.

"Living in New York City, my landscapes are of a very different topography," Buist said. "The pieces convey a reverence for the earth, which manifests itself in quite sensual ways. These works play on the elemental values of sun, water, and morning mist to capture the spirit of each environment."

"It has been observed that some of my paintings almost impart the aroma of the earth," Buist continued. "Each has an underlying sensual quality which will emerge in some surprising manner to reveal the paintings essence. This comes from my intimate relationship with the subject matter.

"In my paintings, I also explore the transformational qualities of light, using the subtle nuances found in refracted morning, afternoon or evening light to embody a particular moment in time," Buist revealed. "Perhaps these sensibilities are a result of having grown up on a farm in rural Michigan — and a flower farm, at that. While sensual, the landscapes are also somewhat political. They return the viewer to a seemingly lost time in which humans interrelated on more fundamental levels with nature. In addition, they speak to today’s need for increasing environmental awareness, as well as preserving that environment."

Artwork by Kathy Buist. Courtesy of the White Room Gallery.

JAMES C. LEONARD

James Leonard is one of California’s leading abstract expressionist painters. Working with an extended palette knife and acrylics on canvas, he creates bold horizontal and vertical strokes in strong colors in order to trigger the viewer’s emotions. This basic movement is complicated by the inventive layering of dropped, speckled and fragmented colors that create a sense of additional depth.

"I’m pulling paint, layering one layer at a time, which creates a sense of history in the painting," Leonard said. "It’s like looking at a fence post that’s been repainted over a period of time. You can see the different colors and layers."

Leonard’s paintings have ambient landscape qualities and can have thirty or forty layers in one painting. His final touch employs a technique he calls sgrafito – scraping lines through the upper layers, so the colors of the ground layers show through. The German painter Gerhard Richer has influenced his style, approach, and directness, said the artist.

James Leonard’s paintings have been exhibited internationally. His works also reside in private and corporate art collections across the United States and Europe.

Artwork by James C. Leonard. Courtesy of the White Room Gallery.

TANYA MINHAS

Tanya Minhas lives and works in Alphabet City (East Village) in New York. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, moved to the United States to attend Princeton University, and stayed on to make New York City her home. She attended graduate school at Columbia University and painted portraits in oils in Mary Beth McKenzie's studio class at Art Students League.

After starting a family, she began making handmade children's clothing from her collection of textiles. In time, she returned to figurative painting and then began making repetitive drawings about the unseen minuscule energies that subtly direct our lives expressed through ink, paint and yarn.

Minhas artwork explores feelings of enforced separations, transformation, dislocation, entanglement, resuscitation, the contrasting and varied faces of beauty, destruction, rebirth, and love. Using her medium of drawing as a visual expression, she expresses her own life force: her spirit.

Minhas has a longstanding and continuous fascination with the etheric nature of the life force in all sentient beings. Her recent art practice explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, and how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world.

She is interested in the composition and states of matter, and in its transformation and direction/redirection via forces that are unseen to the human eye but are fully experiential in their effect.

Artwork by Tanya Minhas. Courtesy of the White Room Gallery.

RYAN T. SCHMIDT

Ryan T. Schmidt’s ambitious intention is to create atmospheric, monumental sculpture that captures the everlasting properties of the sun, water, clouds, and the seasonal landscapes invoking the viewer's imagination for inspiration of great healing and thoughtfulness.

Ideas of shapes and concepts in sweeping arcs consisting of curvilinear, sleek lines and elegant form sculpted into a realized form. The sketches come to life in a three dimensional sculpture. The finish is highly polished to create brilliant and complex mirrored images of organic transformation in the surface of the form as contrast between existence and illusion. His main concept is the reflection of the outside world on the artwork.

Through the curves and smooth lines, his work brings out the feel of free-flowing spirit. Simplicity and importance of life is what he is encouraging through the reflections of sculpture. Schmidt began working in cast aluminum, later in bronze, but ultimately found the everlasting properties of stainless steel with its brilliant reflection to be most satisfying. In 2002, he established Rykan Expedition, Inc. and started combining landscaping, water fountains and outdoor sculpture. Later, he moved to Los Angeles and spent 5 years to focus more on producing sculptures while establishing his gallery relationships.

Schmidt returned to his hometown in Bryant, Arkansas in 2015 to expand the production of sculptures and opened another studio in San Antonio, Texas in 2018. He is currently affiliated with the International Sculpture Center and Texas Artists Coalition. His mission is to share the gift of inspiration through reflection with the passion for stainless steel and desires to build sculpture that will last for many generations to come.

"Inception" by Ryan T. Schmidt, 218. Polished Stainless Steel and stone, 35 x 38 x 10 inches. Courtesy of The White Room Gallery.

_________________________

BASIC FACTS: "With Abstract Certainty" will hold an Opening Reception on Saturday, September 22, 2018, from 5 to 7 p.m. The show is on view from September 20 to October 22, 2018 at The White Room Gallery, 2415 Main Street, Bridgehampton, NY 11932. www.thewhiteroom.gallery.

__________________________