The Abstracts - First Friday Reception

The Venvi Art Gallery presents The Abstracts, a group exhibition featuring abstract paintings by Tallahassee artists Terrie Corbett, Keith McCulloch, and Mark Barr as well as Canadian artists Eugen Denchik and Varda Lantsman. Each unique in style and expression, these artists share an impulse toward innovation, be it in technique, color, texture, or movement.

The show opened on Friday, June 7 and will be on display through July 13.

Varda Lantsman and Eugen Denchik are Toronto-based artists who study at the Yazi School of Visual Arts. Denchik credits his teacher and mentor Jacob Pichhadze with encouraging him to use color and form “to achieve astral, cosmical, musical, [and] lyrical movement” in his paintings. Switching between the use of oil and acrylics, he creates dense and complex combinations of colors, while his visible multidirectional, sweeping brushstrokes suggest mystical undulations.

Varda Lantsman’s paintings are remarkable for their diverse color and texture palettes. On one canvas, Lantsman may use bright, unnatural colors, such as neon orange, hot pink, and fluorescent yellow, while others feature subtle accents of yellow and deep blue on a black and white field. She similarly creates contrasts with textures, juxtaposing for instance sinuous curves with angular lines or overlaying rectilinear color blocks with chaotic swirls.

Terrie Corbett has an expressive use of color, allowing her moods to determine her choice of palettes, whether bright and bold or light and subdued. Working on multiple canvases simultaneously, she finds inspiration in the sensations of nature, love of animals, and art of all kinds, including dance and music. She creates implied and real texture with encaustic (hot wax), cold wax, and oil paints on cradleboard. Her choice of surface allows her to “scrape, dig, and scratch” into the painting to reveal contrasting color without damaging the work’s “substrate.”

Keith McCulloch, a resident of Tallahassee since 2000, specializes in abstractions and landscapes. The Boston-born and Yale-educated artist began painting at the age of eight. Formative visits to galleries in New England and Europe taught him that “lines and shapes and colors talk to one another” and he could “hear their conversation.” Overlaying a thin layer of acrylic paint with oil brushstrokes, McCulloch seeks to create a dialectical tension between opposing forces that gestures toward resolution in his painting.

A painter with 20 years of experience, Mark Barr has shown his work in New York City, Salt Lake City, and Tallahassee. Preferring acrylics, Barr applies a resin coat to many of his paintings. He describes his technique as pairing “bold colors with a contrasting wash or erosion effect” to suggest “depth and duration.” Color—its presence, absence, and contrast with other colors—is a focal point of his work. In Queen (2018), for example, Barr juxtaposes vertical bars of pastel blue and pink with dull black, white, and gray to great effect.

The opening reception of The Abstracts will be held on first Friday, June 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. For more information about Venvi Art Gallery, please visithttps://www.venviartgallery.com/ or call (850) 322-0965.