Our Georgetown shows for 2002

Work by regional, national and international photographers. Work by Karin Rosenthal, Dianora Niccolini, STROM, Tamaki Obuchi, Mitsuou Suzuki, John deFabbio, Maxwell MacKenzie, Geoffrey Sinckler, Maggie Knaus, Danny Conant, Jerry Johnson and Grace Taylor. Opening reception was on Friday, January 18, 6-9 PM.

New figurative and still life mixed media pieces using wood, paper, oils and layers of lacquer and fiberglass by this award-winning Norfolk, Virginia based artist. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, February 15, 2002 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm. See all the works on this exhibition here.

"Getting Out"
2001
21 x 18.5 inches

"Anticipation"
2001
19.5 x 27.5 inches

"The Pugilist"

Our second annual exhibition that takes an early look at the work of fine art students enrolled in an accredited program in the Greater Washington, DC area and who are working within the diverse bounds of the modern contemporary realism genre. Work by Nina Chung Dwyer, Caroline Danforth, Huda Totonji, Sabrina Santiago, Frederick Markham, Hide Ishii, Liz Paxton, L. Ashley Wells, Karen Carruth and Maria Teran. An opening reception for invited art students was held on Friday, March 15. Organizations wishing to sponsor a purchase prize, please contact the gallery at 301/718-9651. Art students wishing to be considered for the 2003 Student Show, please contact the gallery throughout the year.

"Self Portrait"
Oil on canvas, 2001
Hide Ishii
George Mason University School of Art

New figurative paintings with a surreal, femenine touch of fantasy and sensuality. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, April 19, 2002 with a second reception on Wednesday, April 24 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm.

A group exhibition of photography curated by Joyce Tenneson from the book "Exhalations". Work by Amber Amsterdam, Danny Conant, Melanie Petrushkin, Susan Von Cannon, Blanca Santa Maria, Nancy Dunn Schoenfled, Briana Boyle, Mark Frank, Mary Commiskey, Skip Oesterling, Lilili Guerrero, Irit Chernizon Tommasini,Wayne Schoenfeld and Rebecca Kent. A reception for the photographers and a book signing was held on Friday, May 17, 2002 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm and a second reception on Wednesday, May 22 from 6-9 PM. To see many of the photographs on exhibition, click here.

New figurative work by this talented Washington area artist. The focus of this exhibition was man and woman, woman and woman, man and man, mother and daughter, father and son, or single figures in two panels. The work is a mixture of paintings and drawings, large and small, color and black & white. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, June 21, 2002 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm, and a second, by invitation catered reception was held on Wednesday, June 26, 6-8 PM.

Our annual juried competition and an opportunity for emerging artists to compete for over $1000 in cash prizes as well as a solo exhibition for the Best of Show winner and other exhibition opportunities for other prize winners. This year's show was juried by Stacey Schmidt, Assistant Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, who reviewed over 600 entries and selected the below artists for exhibition. For details for the 2003 competition, please read the prospectus here. Prizes have been awarded by the juror as follows:

One of today's most innovative figurative photographers, Karin Rosenthal creates landscapes using the human body as the anchor and focus of her imagery. Through her compositions, the body is often abstracted and reshaped, but always remains beautiful and sensual. To see more of Karin Rosenthal's work click here. To read the various past reviews of Rosenthal at Fraser by the Washington City Paper and others, please click here.

"Vortex"
Karin Rosenthal


Signed copies of Karin's book are available through the gallery.

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Jamie Wimberly opened at the Fraser Gallery of Georgetown on Friday, September 20 and the show runs until October 16, 2002. Read the Digital City review here and read the WETA TV Around Town Best Bet recommendation here and read the public's review of the show here.

In the world of art, especially the visual arts, the word contemporary, when used as an adjective to describe artwork, has been “kidnapped.” As a result, when we hear art described as “contemporary art,” most people have been trained to immediately visualize the work as some sort of abstracted piece, somewhat akin to what was being done 40-50 years ago in America by the likes of Pollock, DeKoonig, Oldenburg and Rothko, and repeated over and over by artists ever since.

Seldom does an artist bring to mind a fresh, appropriate meaning to the word contemporary, within the context of art, as does Jamie Wimberly and more precisely his singularly unique art vision. In his constructions we discover a fresh marriage of two things that have been conspicuously absent from a lot of so-called “contemporary art” – superb technical skill and enviable modern clarity.

This “marrying” or “coupling” of forms and thoughts and issues is a recurring theme in any description of Wimberly’s works. Many of his most successful works incorporate two separate and unrelated items: nearly always a brilliantly executed drawing, and a second part: a box, a found object, a construction, which is intelligently married and coupled to the two dimensional drawing.

The drawings are nearly always figurative and often tend to focus on a red headed woman, a nude narrator of emotions, actions, eroticism and sensuality. They are highly skilled in their technical accomplishment; the figures strike us visually with their accomplished delivery and offer spectacular sensuality, when that is the intended goal, or agony and even pain. This nude woman is an intensely human drawing executed with those remarkable technical skills that are no longer taught in art schools because many of the art professors from those “contemporary art” generations do not possess the ability to teach realism and humanity to the degree so easily mastered by Wimberly. But this woman is just a part of the overall artwork; the drawing is sometimes dominant, but more often than not, submissive to the found object or the box or the constructed schema married to the drawing. We thus end with a brilliantly realistic piece of art within the context of an abstracted form – and it works brilliantly!

What has Wimberly done? He has bridged centuries of art with an eloquence and simplicity that is so easy to admire and so difficult to deliver. When discussing his own work, he says that “he is striving to meet four measures: craftsmanship, connection to ideas/ art history, element of spirituality; and most importantly: beauty and aesthetics.” He could easily accomplish all of those goals with the drawings alone. They are beautifully done, often with a sensuality and eroticism that gives the viewer mental gasps and silent moist thoughts. But he goes further, and it is in this longer path that his work truly manages to stand alone as a true stakeholder in the struggle to reconquer the word “contemporary” from its 50-year-old kidnappers.

In the world of art, among many artists, collectors, critics and curators, often the search for the "new" becomes the Holy Grail for many, but the artwork itself is always the survivor, and when it delivers an important accomplishment, by design, accident or skill, it erases millions of written words in forgotten art reviews intended to give ethereal substance to a bored audience. Wimberly’s works ignores technology, new mediums, sterile subjects and the search for the new. But in his marriage of the solid foundations of art with the manufactured abstraction and conceptuality of our times, he has created something new by refusing to follow the false leads to newness.

Jamie Wimberly opened at the Fraser Gallery of Georgetown on Friday, September 20 and the show runs until October 16, 2002. Read the Digital City review here and read the WETA TV Around Town Best Bet recommendation here and write your own review of the show here.

New York-based painter and sculptor Tristan Schane opens at the Fraser Gallery Georgetown on Friday, October 18 in his solo exhibition debut in the Washington area, titled "TRISTAN SCHANE: SUBVERSIVE REALISM". The show ran until November 13, 2002. Read the Digital City review here and the Georgetowner review here

Schane's paintings and sculptures show the remarkable technical clarity and sculpting and painting skills that recall the great classical masters, but Schane bristles at being called a "realist painter" or even a "surreal artist," although many of his works show a clear debt to the Surrealists.

But what Schane does is not so much imitate and distort the illusion of realism but attack it with enviable technical prowess and a creative sense of composition strongly influenced by his cultural and training background as a comic book artist- a job he had since his early teens.

Still a very young artist, Schane has achieved already near cult status in the underground world of horror and science fiction art collectibles, and yet his fine art work, although deeply influenced by his earlier career as an illustrator, nonetheless brings forth a separate entity within the artist and a refreshing new dialogue to the discussion of contemporary realism.

In 1993 Schane created a set of 32 illustrations centered around Clive Barker's horror classic "The Books of Blood." Signed by both Schane and Barker, these works, published as cards, immediately placed the artist, barely out of his teens as one of the prime figures in that genre of American illustration that co-exists alongside and separate from the fine arts world.

A few years ago, Schane began the "crossover" necessitated by the segregation of fine arts and illustrative art and has developed a body of works that marry the two genres of art into a refreshing and unique new perspective. This exhibition gathers all those works for the first time anywhere.

This will be the solo show debut of Tristan Schane in Washington. An opening reception for the artist, free and open to the public, will be held at the gallery on Friday, October 18 from 6-9 PM. More works by the artist can be seen online here. Write your own review of this show here.

New paintings on wood by Virginia painter Priscilla Young. She is a telented emerging artist whose work depicts honest and somewhat harsh self-representation and her views of others around her. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, November 15, 2002 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm.

In 1975, 19-year-old F. Lennox Campello visited Mexico City and discovered the works of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Almost immediately, he developed an artistic obsession with Kahlo's image and created hundreds of works on that subject, including dozens of art school assignments at the University of Washington School of Art (1977-1981). Although that vast majority of those works were sold over the years, this exhibition chronicles 27 years of preparatory drawings, etchings, oil paintings, watercolors and sculptures about Kahlo. A reception for the artist was held on Friday, December 20, 2002 from 6.00pm - 9.00pm. Read the artist's essay on the subject. And read the Digital City review here.

The Fraser Gallery

1054 31st Street, N.W.
Georgetown
Washington, D.C. 20007
Tel/Fax: (202) 298-6450

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