Evan Penny
Gabriel Vormstein
Massimo Guerrera
Marcel Van Eeden
Spring Hurlbut
Jack Burman
Peter Von Tiesenhausen
‘Within A Budding Grove’ brings together sculpture, photography, drawing, painting and post-war teaching material that, taken collectively, indicates a teeming world of fecund possibility, seed dispersal and the flowering of connective means.
Anchoring the exhibition is Evan Penny’s 1983, hyper-realist, 4/5 life-size sculpture ‘Ali’ with her voluptuous features suggesting a contemporary Venus of Willendorf. Gabriel Vormstein’s large watercolour and gouache ‘Tiny Feet’ is an appropriation of a famous Egon Schiele nude but rendered now on German newsprint. Massimo Guerrera presents two recent works on paper, one a large portrait of the artist with multiple figures emerging from his legs, arms and mouth and the other a highly articulated drawing of a threesome whose corporeal limits seem to have dissolved. Peter von Tiesenhausen’s thickly wrought painting, ‘Burden’, meanwhile, suggests a supine woman at post-partum birth. A school chart from a New York biology class in the 50’s reveals the various strategies that plants (with inadvertently suggestive names) employ for seed dispersal in a ecologically rich situation. A work from Spring Hurlbut’s Oology series takes a page from a natural history text with an illustrated typology of eggs that has been subtly made three dimensional with the seamless insertion of a real egg painted to mimic the rest of its printed brethren. As a womb-shape bulging from the page the egg revitalizes what had been only dryly catalogued before. Jack Burman, a Toronto photographer known for his large-scale images of anatomy specimens in medical museums, here shows a hydrocephalic head of a baby. Doomed to a painfully short existence in real life the infant has been timelessly preserved in its vitrine and on film. Lastly Marcel van Eeden, a Dutch artist who since 1993 has made a drawing a day based on any source that preceded 1965, the year of his birth, here presents a text fragment perhaps lifted from a old science book which reads: “…side your body’s cells – and you are made of trillions of these. each cell is a Lilliputian galaxy…”
