101/Exhibit proudly presents Dynamic Pictorial Models, an exhibition featuring gallery artist Pedro Barbeito in collaboration with artists Lydia Dona, Fabian Marcaccio, and Franklin Evans. The opening will be held from 6-9pm on Saturday, March 12th at 8920 Melrose Ave, located on the corner of North Almont Drive, one block south of Santa Monica Blvd. A full-color catalog with essay entitled “New Models, Strange Tools” by New York-based poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein will accompany the exhibition.

The four artists in this exhibition live and work in New York City. They have noteworthy careers featuring extensive participation in international solo and group shows, have lengthy bibliographies, and their work is included in many private and public collections. Moreover, they are cohorts bonded by a sincere admiration for each other’s artistic practice. This is not simply a coincidence.

Over the past two years, the four artists included in this show would regularly convene to discuss certain elements of innovation found not only in their own work, but also in the art world in general. The ambition was to isolate these elements for exhibition. As a group, these artists sought to actively collaborate in selecting who they exhibit with, who provides the writing, what works are shown, how the exhibition is hung, and where the exhibition takes place - all with the intention of defining the format of a larger, synergistic narrative. The whole (exhibition) is greater than the sum of its parts (artworks). Featuring 1-3 pieces per artist depending on surface area/scale, each of the four artists’ work included will visually and contextually cross-inform each other in response to the gallery space.

101/Exhibit believes in the gallery’s role to facilitate art that proficiently moves beyond market- and trend-driven aesthetics, such as the prevalent de-skilled abstraction of the day. Here the viewer will be presented with an intricate installation of core “dynamic pictorial models”, which loosely defined is a piece of art that embraces conceptual and material complexity. “Strange tools”; implements extracted from their original context for the purposes of art making (see Rubinstein’s essay for a thorough account) are employed here. And there is an awareness and respect for historical precedent vs. superficial stylistic referencing. Engagement is sought through continuing or further articulating the ideas and painterly concerns of past generations through contemporary means.

Further, painting itself remains instrumental to visual experience and in engaging with today’s culture, but DPMs are neither in full allegiance with painting, nor are they in stark opposition of it. There is a belief that painting should be amorphous, a ready-grow that expands beyond the confines of the frame and becomes sculpture or installation in favor of a greater experience. Content is inherent to the materials. Production technologies, scientific innovation, social media, and the Internet are natural products of our anthropological device and are readily embraced. This embrace is sincere, not ironic.

In conclusion, Dynamic Pictorial Models reflects contemporary art practice as it moves after painting to arrive at today’s polymedia picture environment. It does not cease to be painting, but instead challenges the fundamentals to become non-statically mimetic, hyper-mediated, and fully engaged with self-reflective cultural criticality. Dynamic Pictorial Models absorbs the complexity and power of a fluid coexistent culture and attempts to expose its weight in pictorial, visual, and image language.

Pedro Barbeito was born in La Coruña, Spain. He received his BA from Brandeis University in 1992, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1993 and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1996 where he currently serves as head of the printmaking department. He has exhibited his works internationally for the past seventeen years. Barbeito investigates how science and technology can expand painting languages. Interested in science’s ability to visualize phenomena otherwise invisible to human eyes, Barbeito considers how these new visual forms of representation merge with painting’s ability to depict the world.

Lydia Dona was born in Bucharest, Romania and received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and acquired her MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1984. She has participated in over a hundred group and solo exhibitions since 1979. She has lectured extensively on contemporary painting. Her work focuses on the exploration of the urban environment and the encroachment of technology on the human body. Her approach to abstraction often emphasizes a collision of natural form and machinery parts.

Franklin Evans was born in Reno, Nevada. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1989 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1993. He was the recipient of the Cosmopolitan/Art Production Fund P3Studio, Las Vegas, NV in 2015; the Rome Prize Fellowship Finalist for the American Academy in Rome, Italy in 2011; and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2010; among others. Evan’s work reuses parts of his past installations (his history) and incorporates them into new site-specific installations, emphasizing erosion and entropy as a process for transformation. His medium is often art history itself, utilizing imagery that stretches from Matisse to Modernism to Post-Modernism, and painting’s position in that shifting art/field model.

Fabian Marcaccio was born in Rosario, Argentina. He was educated at the University of Philosophy, Rosario, Santa Fe. His works are held in the collections of the MOMA, New York, the Whitney Museum of Art, NY, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and many other international institutions. Marcaccio’s work investigates whether the traditional medium of painting can survive in the digital age. He has used printmaking transfer techniques to make paintings and became well known in the 1990s for his manipulations of the conventions of painting. His “Paintants” and “Draftants” have been exhibited worldwide.