The exhibition „In Conversation“ in today turnaround worlds is curated by gallerist Michaela Helfrich to provide a unique opportunity to view the interactions and shared preoccupations, in a series of spectacular recent works, by two leading artists.There is a common ground and a mutual respect between these two painters, particularly in regard to the ways in which they are both masters of developing and extending tradition while creating paintings of crucial contemporary relevance. The artists share a fascination with making scenarios within a conventional painterly virtuosity while introducing aspects of a kind of ’sleight of hand‘ abstraction which seems only to make the paintings more real. The two artists have each elicited significant critical response.
The painter Gerard Waskievitz transforms the everyday and the bizarre into splendid surreal compositions. With idiosyncratic shimmering color gradients and a light that seems to come from within, he ennobles every motif. By painting it, he is bowing to life! (Dr.Carola Muysers)
Alan Rankle continues to develop the primary themes for which he has become widely known; namely those works relating to the Romantic tradition in landscape art and what the artist describes as the ‘increasingly fragmented and clearly insanely broken relationship of our global societies to the natural environment’.(Ian McNay in Art North Magazine)
For anyone who has followed their individual careers the carefully curated project gives an added dimension to the appreciation of the artists current works. A dialogue in contemporary painting.
