Judy Pfaff, Katy Stone, Ana Maria Hernando

It is with great pleasure that Robischon Gallery presents its fourth solo exhibition for preeminent American artist Judy Pfaff, who takes command of the gallery by igniting the space with eleven sculptures and thirteen framed assemblages. In this exhibition, Pfaff’s new and recent works are predominantly inspired by the unique culture of place – reflecting the artist’s travels to India, China, and Japan. Specifically, Pfaff’s newest sculptures are titled with reference to the Jataka Tales, a voluminous body of Sanskrit literature recounting the many births of the Buddha in both human and animal form. Internationally recognized as a ground-breaking artist, Pfaff’s work has been noted by artist/writer Buzz Spector as, “[having] done more to expand the parameters of site-specific installation than perhaps any other artist of the past thirty years. Her work invites entry into spatial arrays that surround viewers – often in fact, but also, always, metaphorically – in an affect of abundance.”  This exhibition exemplifies Pfaff’s ceaseless creative imperative and presents an opportunity to intimately view the work of a singular artistic force – ever influential and relentlessly pushing the boundaries.

Judy Pfaff has a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO and an MFA from Yale University along with an honorary doctorate degree from Pratt Institute. She has been the recipient of some of the highest honors in her field including: a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Art Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Fellowship, Nancy Graves Foundation Grant, the Dean’s Medal from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Southern Graphics Council International Conference Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Art and Letters, NY.  In 1998, she was selected as the US representative to the Bienal de Sao Paulo. Her work is in many public collections including: Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright-Knox Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art,  Elvehjem Museum, Madison, WI, Sun Hwa Art and Culture Foundation, Seoul, Korea and the Sammlung Ludwig, in Aachen, Germany.

Katy Stone

Reflective of the generative manner of her process, Seattle artist Katy Stone begins each wall sculpture as a considered gesture from her countless stream-of-consciousness drawings. Evolving in a manner similar to her earlier painted Duralar works, the artist’s chosen mark becomes a cut metal piece, mounted layer upon layer and into a proliferation of kaleidoscopic forms. Chance plays a role toward the final composition while light and shadow compound the overall effect of expansiveness. Stone’s approach to systematic patterning with a specific form repeated many times is illustrated in the sculptural installations Thundercloud and Tangle MT, where the same bi-curved element either swirls up like an approaching, sunset-tinged thunderhead or billows downward like a verdant, wind-swept branch. Equally, the linear element that suggests bark on the entitled Snag sculpture becomes the form employed to convey as well the cascading, sun-dappled water of Melt Falls. Whether it is found in the artist’s two dimensions works on paper or in three dimensions, Stone’s surrender to metaphorical landscape captures motion and stillness at the nexus where painting and sculpture bisect.

Katy Stone received her BFA from Iowa State University and her MFA from University of Washington, Seattle.  She has had solo exhibitions at Boise Art Museum and Missoula Art Museum and been in group shows at the Seattle Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, among others with numerous gallery exhibitions. Her work, including large-scale installations, is found at the King County Correctional Facility and Horizon House, both in Seattle, WA and the Jackson Federal Courthouse in Jackson, MI and the corporate offices of Conoco Phillips in Houston, TX, among others.

Ana Maria Hernando

Ana Maria Hernando, known for her brightly-hued floral subjects and sculptural installations, immerses viewers into the metaphorical possibilities of the night garden with her new series of paintings on paper entitled “Fire Night”. Argentinean-born Hernando has long been interested in concealing and revealing through layers, as exemplified in her previous installations of starched Peruvian petticoats and cast resin discs encasing cloth floral forms hand- embroidered for her by cloistered Argentinean Carmelite nuns. In keeping, in this latest series, the artist’s typically bright overall palette is veiled by atmospheric hues of charcoaled blue and rich black evoking the quietude of nightfall. Suffused throughout the precipitating, ebonized blue are electric orange and pink flowers – a kind of illumination – suggesting the irrepressible power of Nature both seen and unseen. The artist’s poetic statement further expands:

‘In the night, the ends and the beginnings are one, everything melts into the obscure and it all becomes an intimate immensity. The outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside. What is far and open embraces us, pulls us closer. In the night, the moon and the stars bathe us in their white fire, caressing us softly, revealing the nocturnal voices and transforming our orange song.” 

Ana Maria Hernando attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon, Buenos Aries, Argentina, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, International Center of Bethlehem, Bethlehem, West Bank Palestine and will have an exhbition at the Oklahoma City Arts Center in Oklahoma City in 2013.