: Spanierman Gallery will host, January 6-29, "Toward Simplicity:
New Paintings by Pamela Sztybel."
This exhibition presents new oils by Sztybel, a landscape painter
in the American Tonalist tradition currently living in New York
City. The show will be accompanied by a catalog available from
the gallery.
Although trained as a figural painter in the academic manner,
Sztybel gravitated to landscape as she found it the best subject
matter with which to create works of extreme simplicity that
explore the limits of cognition and memory.
Her paintings evoke the inspiration that she has drawn from the
art of Camille Corot, Giorgio Morandi, John Twachtman, William
Merritt Chase and the American Tonalists, in particular the late
canvases of George Inness. Like the Tonalists, she works in the
studio, deriving her images from recollections of places she has
seen mostly in New England, and she uses drawings and photographs
only as aides-de-memoir.
Working in oils on paper and linen, Sztybel's process is to
isolate aspects of particular places and winnow them toward
simplicity. Abstracting them to their most elemental shapes, she
expresses them through a sfumato effect in which a shifting
balance of atmospheric light and dark become her subject matter.
Blurring forms and softening outlines, she gives her images a
spatial incongruity in which depth and surface are
indistinguishable.
Sztybel was born in New York City in 1956 and studied at the New
School for Social Research, in the MFA program at the New York
Academy of Art, and under Wolf Kahn. She is currently a trustee
for the Vermont Studio Center, and has had fellowships to work at
both the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center.
She has also participated as a visiting artist and as a teacher
at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, and has
taught workshops at Connecticut College, New London, Conn.; the
West Liberty State College, West Virginia; and the Long Beach
Island Foundation for the Arts in New Jersey. Her works can be
found in numerous illustrious corporate and private collections.
The gallery is at 45 East 58th Street. For information,
212-832-0208.
