Laura Rathe Fine Art announces an exciting joint exhibition featuring world-renowned artists, Gavin Rain, Gil Bruvel and Robert Mars. LRFA will be hosting the opening reception on Thursday, September 30th from 6-9pm at their River Oaks District gallery (4444 Westheimer Rd.)
Combining new-age techniques with timeless portraiture, Face-to-Face showcases the artist’s unique explorations of the human form through their own modes of geometric expression. Colorful hand-painted dots, hand-cut wooden sticks layered with machine-like precision, and a nostalgic 1950s collages create bodies of work that break the traditional conventions of their mediums. As the viewer moves farther from the artwork, the subject matter becomes all the clearer, pushing the lines of abstraction to new heights.
This exhibition will be on display through October 25th 2021.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Gil Bruvel has passionately followed an ever-changing, organic flow of artistic expression as it has moved through a series of mediums and forms. Each one reflects the artist’s aesthetic sensibility and thoughtful perspective at the time, while continuously remaining open to the inner nudges inherent in a truly creative life. As the son of a renowned cabinetmaker in southern France, Gil absorbed the precision of hand and an eye for design. Studies in the fundamentals of drawing and sculpture began when he was nine. Later, apprenticeship in an art restoration workshop provided an excellent art history education with intimate, hands-on insight into techniques of the Old Masters as well as a fluency in 20th-century art. By the time the young artist set up his own studio, he was combining these and other creative sources with a finely honed eye for recurring patterns and motifs in the natural world. In 1990, he settled in the United States.
Gavin Rain was born in Cape Town in 1971. He studied Art and Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town in the 80s and 90s. Rain has been painting his whole life but started with pointillism around 2003. He is influenced by Seurat and Russian avant-garde art of the 1900s. Rain’s objective is to broaden people’s visual and cognitive horizons by showing them the fantastic and impossible. By combining his origins, his studies, aptitudes and personal talent, Rain has invented an art that is both unique and participative so that all who look at one of his paintings can perceive the convergence of two opposing pictorial styles: the abstractness of the multitude of colorful concentric circles that thicken into dense and imperfect dots in relief, and the figurative aspect of the image that is defined by the sum of these same dots as the viewer takes a few steps back.
Robert Mar's artwork chronicles an evolving fascination with the Golden Age of American popular culture and celebrates the icons of the 1950s and 60s by taking inspiration from this culture long past. Through the application of a rich color palette and tongue-in-cheek attitude, Mars’ paintings evoke a vintage quality of design and pay homage to the idealized age of growth and hopefulness that was prevalent in the USA at the end of the Depression. A time before the internet and mobile technology, where information was not instantly available to millions and there was no such thing as instant internet celebrities, and instead people lived with the myth of the unique, untouchable and unforgettable personalities of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Audrey Hepburn and Elvis Presley.