Structural Through-Line (Coherence)

Paul Davies, Christina Shurts & Andre Yi  

February 27 – April 3, 2010

Opening Reception, Saturday, February 27th, 6 – 10pm

Lawrence Asher Gallery examines structure through the eyes and compositions of three distinctive painters.  Paul Davies balances exquisite modern architecture in abstracted, painterly environs utilizing contemporary art-making techniques.  Christina Shurts’ loose and free application of paint reduces concerns with engineering principles of her super-structures.  Dream states and imperfect memories serve as the catalyst of her creations.  Andre Yi continues his masterly renderings of landscape and structure from a more focused, natural perspective.  These paintings, inspired by his own photographs of National forests and parks, effectively examine man’s complex relationship with the natural world.

Please join us for the opening reception of this exceptional show on Saturday, February 27th, 2010,

6 – 10 pm.  Lawrence Asher Gallery is located at 5820 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and adjacent to the Craft and Folk Art Museum. Parking is available on Wilshire Blvd. and behind 5858 Wilshire Boulevard. For more information, please call 323.935.9100

The Artists

Paul Davies  - Primarily based on American and Australian Modern Architecture and treated in a contemporary manner, the latest series of works by Australian artist Paul Davies features the use of delicate hand-cut paper stencils.  These stencils, composed from personal as well as researched photographs, provide perspective, content and detail within Davies’ painterly abstract environment.

Influenced by his recent study exploration of California, Davies’ work continues to focus on American Modernist Architecture and its profound influence on Australian Modernist design. Davies research tour included visits to the Schindler and Eames Houses in Los Angeles where the architects experimented in new ways of appreciating America’s West coast environment.  Continuing on to Palm Springs, Davies visited Richard Neutra’s iconic Kauffman House and Frank Sinatra’s infamous holiday retreat.  Built in the 1940’s and 50’s, these buildings featured in Davies’ paintings remain vacant of people to reinforce the original idea of its architect; allowing the viewer to experience an “open plan living” ideal. Davies’ work examines both the restored and forgotten modernist buildings in ways that allow them to be relevant rather than isolated in their time.  In creating this unique style of landscape painting, Paul Davies cites inspiration from some of the world's greatest living artists such as Peter Doig, David Hockney and David Schnell.

Over the past three years, Davies has been commissioned by government and private clients including BYL Companies in Philadelphia; Historic Houses Trust Australia; Stocklands, Australia; and Wilson & Hill Architects, New Zealand, to interpret particular iconic modern buildings across America and other countries. Recent publications in which Davies has appeared include Art & Australia, Art World, Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Belle, Wish, Inside Out, Urbis, and Yen magazine as part of the China Heights Collective, an artist-run studio space and gallery located in Sydney’s Surry Hills where Davies has worked since its inception in 2004.

Christina Shurts - In these paintings, appropriated architectural structures combine with memory and transform into fiction. The use of color triggers an emotional read that connects to the viewer’s recollection of place contained within the layered linear architectural constructions. The superstructures rely on the hierarchy of their structural underpinnings.  References to social constructs are also contained within the way forms are painted while layers allude to the time and building leading up to the desired edifice.  A strange humor exists in this imaginary world through the awkward forms and “off” color palette. This offers a reprieve from the serious nature of the subject matter. 

Christina Shurts’ paintings have been exhibited on the West coast and abroad. Highlights include the Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park, LOFT Gallery, San Pedro, CA,  and the inaugural exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, London, UK Showdown Exhibition. Shurts is a MFA candidate (2010) at California State University Long Beach.

Andre Yi - For this series of paintings, I photographed trees and landscapes in and around Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Using the photographs as a reference, I rendered these images using colored pencil and gouache. I then de-contextualized the highly rendered landscape within a flat, acrylic ground.

My paintings approach landscape much as Piet Mondrian did; as an individual's formal and emotional relationship to nature. In addition, I seek to depict mankind's feeble attempt to capture and control the natural world though my exaggerated use of geometric and mathematical reinterpretations of exalted scenic landscapes. I am curious about our relationship to nature, how it affects us, and how we as a society, and myself as an artist, can express humankind's complex relationship to the natural world.