Join Nuart Gallery for Layers— a group exhibition featuring new works by John Tarahteeff and Claire B. Cotts — two artists who offer contrast between figurative and abstract work, but harmony through their rhythm and richness of color.
John Tarahteeff’s work is a blend of realism and surrealism, occupying the space between imagination and reality. Initially, Tarahteeff experimented with abstraction, then settled on something closer to realistic representation. He continues to take liberties in his art, building from the ground up based on his imagination. Over the years, artificiality began seeping in and his paintings became almost like dioramas that play with size and proportion. In his most recent work, Tarahteeff continues to take elements of realism and abstracts them ever so slightly.
Claire B. Cotts’s richly layered abstractions inhabit a space between texture and rhythm. Inspired by forms in nature, much of her work is an exploration of the tension and precarious balance of contradictory elemental forces —heaviness vs weightless buoyancy, contraction vs unfurling, entropy vs order. In Cotts’s newest paintings, forms emerge and recede, float weightlessly and are counterbalanced by the pull and tug of gravity. These paintings attempt to capture a fleeting sensation or a moment in time — summer warmth, spring awakening, and the long winter.
