Stefan Kleinschuster : New Paintings

Colorado-based artist Stefan Kleinschuster continues to prod at our expectations of painting the human figure with his new series of canvases. Kleinschuster's uncanny ability to evoke the myriad facets of human contact – ranging from affection to violence – places viewers in worlds both self-reflective and unsettling. In an attempt to contrast the demand for "realism" against abstract constituents, Kleinschuster renders his ironically classical nudes through playful, and perhaps occasionally even insolent applications of paint. The artist's painterly textures occasionally gives his image an aggressive edge, the paint seems to sear the body, suggesting that it is inwardly wounded. Kleinschuster's engagements with the corporal aspects of both paint and flesh paired with his provocative and occasionally dislocated mark-making and perspective creates figures with unexpected dynamism and poignancy.

Kleinschuster was named the best regional representational artist by the Rocky Mountain News in 2004. Trained as a printmaker, Kleinschuster received his Master of Fine Arts from Colorado State University in1999. In 2002, Kleinschuster's notable series Neutral Ground was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado. He has completed several large-scale commissions in the region, both as a painter and a sculptor.

Multi-media artist Ann Hamilton has been internationally recognized as one of the most important artists of her generation. Her body of work includes experimental photography, video, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Hamilton situates her aesthetic practice as always dealing with borders, thresholds, and in-between sites. The artist is as interested in verbal and written language as she is in the visual, and she sees the two as related and interchangeable. Hamilton's most recent photographic work, the Face series, investigates what happens when sensory perceptions shift from one location to another on the body, namely when the mouth becomes a surrogate eye. Using her mouth as the aperture for pinhole photographs, Hamilton creates her mysterious images by facing her portrait subject with her mouth wide open for the length of the exposure. The oddly formal act of facing a stranger for a given period of time with one's mouth uncomfortably posed lends itself to quickly established intimacy between the artist and her subject. The dislocations and slippages inherent in this confusion of the verbal and the visual allow the spectator to see intersubjective relationships in new and profound ways.

Hamilton has created major installations for The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The DIA Foundation, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Art Institute, Chicago; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; and The Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Hamilton was the American representative at the 1991 Sao Paulo Biennial and the 1999 Venice Biennial. In 1993 she received the MacArthur Genius Award.