Opening Reception
Saturday July 3, 5-7pm
Free and Open to Public, Masks required indoors
Anne Leone
Statement
Anne Leone has been painting swimmers for 29 years. Her fascination with these figures began as she was anticipating a new baby, and in her earliest works, members of her family move through a shifting aquatic world in which the water functions as a metaphor for life, purity, and birth. Over time, she has widened her focus to explore themes of independence, vulnerability, and other emotional states, in response to events in her life.
While traveling in the Yucatán Peninsula in 2007, her family serendipitously came across a freshwater pond down a jungle path. From the surface it looked unassuming, but underneath, the world was transformed. This was a sinkhole, and the underground cave it created was profoundly deep and dark. Sunlight streamed through the crystal clear water, making dramatic, coruscating patterns that zigzagged across swimmers’ bodies. On the underside of the surface, their reflections made deformed, stunning patterns, reverberating with every movement. In this strange world, familiar images metamorphosed into something mythic and timeless.
These unique environments have become the setting for Anne Leone’s increasingly complex paintings of swimmers. The works convey the quietness and calm of being underwater, and although the water is invisible, it is dense and full of motion. The swimmers’ bodies create a weightless architecture free from the bounds of gravity. At the water’s surface, their forms warp into contrasting, abstract shapes in this luminous, dramatic world, as if their identities have collapsed.
Daniel Ludwig
Biography
Daniel Ludwig is an artist who works in oil paint, charcoal and, more recently, acrylic paint on printed digital backgrounds. In his work, dreamlike figurative elements are embedded in a complex web of biomorphic shapes, patterns, and colors. Classically rendered figurative elements interact with echoed silhouettes and textures in a way that portray the ambiguity of a world both deeply tangible and alluringly ephemeral.
He has exhibited extensively at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, Galerie Friedmann-Hahn in Berlin, the Cadogan Contemporary Gallery in London, the Heike Pickett Gallery in Kentucky and the Dedee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, MA. In 2018 the Georgetown College Art Galleries in Kentucky hosted a retrospective of his work from the last forty years. His art is widely collected in the United States and in Europe. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Berkley, MA with his wife, the artist, Anne Leone.
In November of 2019, he created a digital animation that formed the backdrop for a performance of Victor Ullmann’s musical setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s, The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke at Boston Symphony Hall.
Statement
“The images we form in our brains are not fixed, but are powerfully influenced by what we know, how we feel, and by the passage of time. My paintings attempt to portray this layered residue of multiple experiences and memories. “
