Dorsch Gallery is pleased to present three solo shows: Mette Tommerup’s 11 Glimpses, Magnus Sigurdarson’s The Fall of the Pedestial Sentience: Last Stand of the Fabulous, Terrific and Super! and Lisa Perez’s no end to.
There will be an opening reception on Friday, April 9th, 7-10pm. The gallery will also be open for Second Saturday on April 10th, 7-10pm
On Saturday, April 10, 2-3pm, the artists will give a tour through their shows.
In 11 Glimpses Mette Tommerup eschews clichéd modes of painterly self-expression, adopting thumbnail images as subject matter for her intimately-scaled paintings. Tommerup explains: “Spare, urgent moments are explored in intimate oil paintings that take on the mission of the Danish Film movement, Dogme 95, established in the year 1995. This group of filmmakers offers a resistance to Hollywood and its overwrought special effects and other distractions to form a direct filmmaking process. These paintings represent my own Painting Dogme. They aim to slow down time, cull unwanted information and mock Nordic Angst. There are no special effects, just the bare provisions to convey a story, or unsettled moment. Here and now situations are glimmers of imagery that shed personal iconography, chronicles and comprehension.” She is currently an Assistant Painting Professor at Florida International University, where she also established and manages Artist Forum, FIU’s alternative student exhibition venue. Tommerup received her MFA from the School of Visual Art in NYC and her BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Denmark, she has exhibited widely in Europe, including exhibitions in Copenhagen, London and recently in Berlin. She lived and worked in New York City for 10 years, exhibiting frequently in venues such as The Chelsea Art Museum and Exit Art, before relocating to Miami. Recent exhibitions in Miami include shows at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Locust Projects, The Wolfsonian-FIU, the Bass Museum of Art, The Moore Space and CasaLin. Tommerup’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, The Miami Herald and was included in Miami Contemporary Artists 2007 by Julie Davidow and Paul Clemence and Miami Arts Explosion 2006 by Alfredo Triff. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of Miami Art Museum, and numerous public and private collections.
In The Fall of Pedestial Sentience: Last Stand of the Fabulous, Terrific and Super!, Magnus Sigurdarson, in association with Yann Quillien, installs a heap of pedestals, piled up to the ceiling. From inside some of the pedestals, fans blow flags of text, bearing slogans like “Terrific!” “Fabulous!” or “Super!” The associations to art, to revolution, to islands and isolation, to his native Iceland and other cold places multiply, leaving one laughing, confused, or cheering on the artist’s genius. Or all of these. Born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1966, Magnus Sigurdarson studied at Studio Cecil & Graves in Florence Italy, Icelandic College of Arts & Crafts, and Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. He has exhibited widely at such venues as PanAmerican Art Projects in Dallas and Miami, Luhring Augustine in New York and Kevin Bruk Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach 2007 and internationally in Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Germany and China apart from his Native Iceland. His works are in the permanent collections of The Icelandic National Gallery, The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Reykjavik Municipal Museum, The Collezione La Gaia, Busca, Italy and The Focus Group Corporate Collection in New York, among others. He currently lives and works in Miami.
Lisa Perez presents no end to., a luminous sculptural installation rooted in her drawing practice. Working from freehand lines, Perez cuts paper and wood into sculptures that embrace a tension between gestural expression and minimalism. The sculptures cast shadows that take on a life of their own, re-mapping the original two-dimensional lines and harboring spikes of glowing color. Underneath this seemingly quiet installation buzzes a pressure visible in Perez’s hand: the effort to hold steady, look closely, and work against the grain of daily over-stimulation in our hyper-visual culture. Perez has exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York, DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and most recently a solo show at the 5 Traverse Gallery in Providence, RI, for which she earned a New England Art Award nomination. Perez received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley and currently lives and works in Providence, RI. This is Perez’s first exhibition in Miami. The exhibition marks the beginning of a collaboration between Maya Allison, independent curator from Providence, RI, and Dorsch Gallery.