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Great Barrington's Carrie Chen Gallery

Exhibits Anton Ginzburg and Christina Kruse

By: - Mar 04, 2022

The  Carrie Chen Gallery  presents The buildings, piled so casually from March 5 – April 3, 2022. This exhibition unites Anton Ginzburg’s abstract paintings with Christina Kruse’s fantastic imaginary worlds and layered constructions under the poetic title taken from the late poet laureate John Ashbery of Hudson, NY. A public reception will be held on Saturday, March 5 from 3 – 5 pm. A series of poetry readings by MA and NY based poets will take place throughout the month of March. Images for reproduction are listed below with captions and links for download.

In conceiving of this exhibition, Anton Ginzburg and Christina Kruse refer to the preeminent American poet, John Ashbery, whose unharnessed approach to style and composition inspired them and is reflected in their work. The show borrows its title from the first line of Ashbery’s poem Spring Light, an iconic example of the poet’s fractured style and fluid approach to constructing prose. Each coming from a European Modernist tradition, the artists share Ashbery’s aesthetic and describe their formal interest in construction, balance, and composition itself as central to their practice. Anton Ginzburg’s paintings are from his recent Translucent Series (2020-2021), a collection of distinct views of New York City and the Berkshires that collectively read as a pictorial montage of the landscape. Christina Kruse’s sculpture explores the ever-present dichotomies in human existence, the limits of balance, and the facets of consciousness and perception.

Chief Curator and Gallery Owner Carrie Chen comments “I find the relationship between Anton and Christina’s work striking and unexpected, it emerges through their imaginative engagement with space, objects, and form. Anton’s use of color and composition draws the viewer into a contained, but deeply evocative, interpretation of landscape and architecture. Christina invites us to openly explore without boundaries while still grounding the viewer with detail and a sense of place.”

In developing his Translucent Series, Ginzburg drew from his own living environment of Chatham Towers — a concrete, brutalist building constructed during the Cold War in 1969 in Lower Manhattan. Views of emptied-out glass towers, light- filled public spaces, and concrete environments are framed against large windowpanes with acute geometries, unfolding to reflect Ginzburg’s impressions of interior and exterior spaces. The series also depicts views of the Hudson valley, where geometric forms are drawn from mountains, grounded by a horizon line. Ginzburg’s faceted paintings are representations of material nature, modern architecture, and landscape filtered through his perception, emotion and affect.

Christina Kruse explains her practice “thrives on the notion of construction—that a work of art can necessarily be produced out of multiple elements that fit and connect with one another, emphasizing the challenges of balance within one structure’s physical and mental properties.” Like Ashbery’s poetry, Kruse’s work pushes the boundaries of balance and composition, She emphasizes the struggle in finding balance within ourselves and with our external world. Her recent construction Lunapark is a busy, miniature world filled with ambiguous, figure-like forms maneuvering through a playground, all of its components tenuously balanced together, while remaining distinct and separate from one another. Her other sculptures composed of bronze, wood, and marble recall a modernist aesthetic, combining smooth geometric forms in balanced harmony to evoke human forms, heads, and faces.

Anton Ginzburg is a New York-based artist and educator, whose practice combines painting, graphic art, moving image, and architectural collaborations. He is known for his films, sculptures, paintings, and two-dimensional work investigating historical narratives and poetic studies of place, representation, and modernist form. He earned a BFA from Parsons, The New School and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. In 2021 Ginzburg was a research fellow at the Schaufler Lab at the Technical University of Dresden with the topic of Artificial Intelligence, Technology, and Creative Labor. He is a regular visiting artist and lecturer at Pratt Institute (NY), Columbia University (GSAPP), University of Pennsylvania, School of Visual Arts (NY), Parsons, The New School (NY), NYU Tisch School of the Arts (Graduate Department of Design for Stage and Film), University of Lethbridge (Southern Alberta), University of Massachusetts and Goethe Institute.

His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Canada, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns in New York, Lille 3000 in Euralille, France, and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), Dallas Symphony Orchestra (Soluna), Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Dresden Film Festival and New York Film Festival/Projections among others.

Christina Kruse is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist who works across the fields of photography, painting, and sculpture. Her ongoing body of sculptural works combine bronze, marble and wood in standing arrangements that reference geometry. Although grounded in structure, balance, and stability, Kruse’s sculptures nevertheless evoke similarities to the human head and face, drawing connections between rationality and the oftentimes more capricious side of human life.

Previous significant works include Dystonia (2013), a three-part performance artwork where Kruse confronts the instability of the human lived experience. Her earlier photographic and collage works draw on her personal biography, often deploying self-portraits layered with tape, watercolor, ink, and other media in her formal compositions. Kruse is a recipient of the GLAAD award for Best Emerging Artist in Photography (2005). Her works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in New York, UK, France, Austria, and Germany.

The Carrie Chen Gallery is located on Railroad Street in Great Barrington, MA. The gallery showcases talented artists locally and globally, working in a wide range of style and media. We support artists and share their visionary work with audiences by remaining at the integrity of innovation. The gallery follows its mission through comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations and collaboration. Gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday, 11am – 5 pm. www.carriechengallery.com