From April 5-26, New City Arts and The FUNd at CACF presents Sculpture and Color, an exhibition of sculpture by Robert Strini and paintings by Ken Horne.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
April 5 from 5-7:30 PM
Gallery Hours
Noon-4 PM, Monday-Friday
Sponsors
This Welcome Gallery Exhibit Opening Reception is sponsored Tilman’s. This season’s Welcome Gallery exhibits are supported by an Enriching Communities grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.
Exhibition Statements (provided by the artists)
Robert Strini’s Artist Statement: My sculpture over the last 60 years has gone through a lot of changes. From the decorative object to the narrative story, I have worked through many issues such as fears, insecurities, politics, and the realities of death and war, all of which have fueled the fires of my creative process.
In college, I became interested in clay because of its immediacy and began to incorporate paint, leather and flocking to create a more diverse surface and an enhanced overall form. Eventually, I turned to wood and, most recently, bgan to cast wood pieces in bronze to achieve greater permanency. The process of problem solving and discovery is central to the creation of my art. I will experiment with many materials before I choose the ones that are right for a specific concept.
These tripod pieces explore the interior of a sphere. The supporting structure is delicately balanced and, at times, insecure. Consider the rocking legs on the Tripod with Green Wheel. The wheel is the naive element, sort of childlike, being released from the sphere. Other things play into the idea, like structure, color and surface. The cold lead, for example, is almost like a scientific instrument. Cutting into the sphere is the beginning of exploring its interior. All of this leads to a dialogue between the art piece and the viewer.
Ken Horne’s Artist Statement: Ken Horne's paintings bring the traditions of modern abstraction together with the language of psychology and cartography to create compositions that combine elements of both physical and psychic space. Bustling with color and activity, the work balances structure and expression as it conveys situational or emotive qualities. With a nod to the simple, primitive beauty of preschool and outsider art, Ken playfully explores the gaps between polarities like intention and accident or crudeness and sophistication.
About the Artists (provided by the artists)
Robert Strini is a sculptor living and working in Scottsville, Virginia. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California at Berkeley and has exhibited his work in galleries nationwide for nearly six decades. Robert has been awarded numerous grants, residencies, and awards, including the prestigious Rome Prize Fellowship in Sculpture from the American Academy of Art. His work is held in national collections including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of Art, the Tacoma Museum of Art, and the Fralin Museum of Art.
Ken Horne is a painter and social worker based in Charlottesville, Virginia. He completed his BA at the University of Colorado and his MFA in Visual Art at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Ken lives with his wife and two kids in Albemarle County amid 3 dogs, 4 cats, 2 chickens, and 2 sweet, old donkeys.
Artwork images courtesy of the artists.
