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.
