01/04/2023
Excited to share installation images of Penumbrae, a two person exhibition with 💙
We will be hosting a closing reception this Saturday from 5-7pm 💙
Gallery will be open from 12-6pm Sat & Sun 💙
Balgley's recent abstract paintings explore a visual language stemming from interests in still life, vanitas, and trompe l'oeil. Balgley is interested in reexamining these historical genres of painting, which have often been deemed as simply decorative or déclassé, by inverting their basic tropes and forms to create hallucinatory, living tableaus. Moving away from depiction, Balgley improvises on the canvas - building layers of color, shape and form into what can be interpreted as illusionistic arrangements. Balgley captures a nod to the figurative, with a visual presence balancing between portraiture or sculpture - but it disintegrates before a form is ever realized. As a painting progresses, Balgley will often focus attention to what feels like a self contained logic - finessing surface details and playing with shadows, space, and lighting. What results is an invented physical realm, alluding to a reality that has been filtered and morphed into something hallucinatory and unreal.
Through forms that exist between the figurative and abstract, Pietrzak seeks to capture moments of instability, unrest, vulnerability, and precariousness, to expose how tensions carried internally within ourselves manifest as outward gestures worn on our bodies. The honesty of these expressions, is sometimes more revealing than the words meant to explain them. When body language does not match verbal prose, intuitively we believe how someone seems rather than what they say. Pietrzak shapes forms which lean, press, and resist the picture frame. Gold leaf is used, not as an embellishment, but as the primary medium of the work. As it also carries a tension as a paradox of something that was once unbearably heavy, now made impossibly light. Pietrzak explores these themes and expands her investigation into other media, including raw pigments, where potent, embedded emotions within color are un-contained, expansive, and exposed.
For available works visit
