Echo explores the interplay between the inspiration each artist has found in their respective contemporary times and their personal relationship to the legacy and lexicon of modern abstraction, resulting in playful, powerful, and engaging artworks that invite the discovery of new worlds and landscapes for the viewer to explore.
Modern West is excited to feature Echo, a four person online exhibition showcasing works by our represented artists Beatrice Mandelman, Shalee Cooper, Jerrin Wagstaff, and Dimitri Kozyrev. This online exclusive exhibition will be on display from April 1, 2023 through June 30, 2023.
Echo explores the interplay between the inspiration each artist has found in their respective contemporary times and their personal relationship to the legacy and lexicon of modern abstraction, resulting in playful, powerful, and engaging artworks that invite the discovery of new worlds and landscapes for the viewer to explore.
Beatrice Mandelman, (December 31, 1912 – June 24, 1998), known as Bea, was an American abstract artist associated with the group known as the Taos Moderns. Much of her work was highly abstract, including her representational pieces such as cityscapes, landscapes, and still lifes. She used collage references and techniques, both bright and subdued color palettes, and organic geometric forms to recreate the purity of nature she observed through her Modernist, Constructivist, and abstract lens.
Influenced by her background in photography, Shalee Cooper has found inspiration in working from a minimalist perspective, allowing her to explore the possibilities and relationships between the basic compositional elements of positive and negative space. Also finding inspiration in her many years of curation, Cooper’s pared-down, romantic, and innovative paintings that utilize raw canvas, black gesso and the use of spare, sometimes repetitive shapes and elements, allow the collector to imagine and arrange their own compositions from the originals Cooper presents when exhibiting.
Jerrin Wagstaff specializes in depicting the examination of his visual experiences in the internet era, and the complexities of living in an attention based economy. He draws upon images pulled from news media, staged catalogs, stadium events, and video stills. His individual themes of painting drift between desire, loss, and identity to shape personal and universal space.
Dimitri Kozyrev, a Leningrad, USSR-born artist, creates paintings that stem from his observations of actual, physical landscapes and mental landscapes of both his and the collective imagination. He reflects on the ruins of war, human impact, and the scars left behind on the land in the aftermath of our actions. Through his Modernist, Constructivist methods, he rearranges pictorial elements and visual perspectives to create a contemplative space within his paintings.
The works of Beatrice Mandelman, Shalee Cooper, Jerrin Wagstaff, and Dimitri Kozyrev offer a reflection of tension and the inbetween–capturing the essence of what is not there as much as what is depicted–to embody their unique perspectives and interpretations of what the West and its landscapes are to them.
