The new Elisa Contemporary Art exhibit, Dive In 2020, opens July 8 at the Elisa Contemporary Art Gallery in Riverdale NY. It will run through September 2, 2020. This new gallery exhibit will leap into the Summer Season with underwater swimmers, Surfers, poolside scenes, and water and beach-inspired artwork. It will feature the work of Hawaii artist, Carol Bennett and Marfa artist, Martha Hughes.

We have safety precautions and protocols in place in accordance with health guidelines including a limited number of visitors and masks required when in the gallery.

While each artwork communicates a playful summer feel, there is often a deeper meaning and significance as well. Each has a different relationship and significance for focusing on water and the surrounding areas. Bennettuseswaterasameditativejourneythroughspaceandlife. AccordingtoBennett,"My paintings comes from a personal place: I swim 7 days a week, and while I don’t consider them self-portraits, I am the swimmer in the paintings. This is a spiritual practice that is integral to my artwork. Presently I’m fixated on just water itself, always present yet moving and changing, first it’s a mirror and then a window. What is unique about my art and my swimmers, in particular, is their strong sense of self and place."

The exhibit also features a surfer painting and new surfboard series.

The works by Martha Hughes are all grounded by the artist’s interest in color, place, stasis/movement, and time. Her Scenes series simultaneously explores the disorientation of being human in a manufactured world and the potential of that world. This Pool Series of paintings portray images of impossibly pristine, impeccably beautiful houses, gardens, and pools. Hughes has stripped these down to their barest colors, distorting angles and proportions, to fabricate the momentary uneasiness one can unexpectedly feel in familiar spaces. At the same time, these intimate slices of perfectly landscaped spaces create in the viewer a dreamy sense of hope and peace.