Press Releases

Wendt Gallery Hosts Major Exhibition to Benefit Salaam Balak Trust

Photography exhibition to feature works by 3 major photographers from India.

Photographs by Pablo Bartholomew, Prabir Purkayastha and Amita Talwar to be showcased

Wendt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of their new exhibition Vanishing Spirits on view from September 8^th through September 17^th, 2010. The exhibition will be open for public viewing Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. Vanishing Spirits is lead by a strong team including Exhibition Curator, Priyanka Mathew of Sotheby’s; Exhibition Director, Karen Stone Talwar; Director of Sales, Payal S. Parekh and Director of Marketing, Neil Ghosh. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Salaam Baalak Trust, founded by philanthropist and filmmaker Mira Nair.

A private reception will be hosted by Joseph and Serina Manqueros of Wendt Gallery on Wednesday, September 8^th, from 6 pm to 8 pm. Cocktails and hors d’oevres will be served. If you would like to attend or would like more information, please phone 212-838-8818, or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please RSVP if you wish to attend.

There is a rich tradition of Indian photographers who continue to provide a vessel to catalog the constant decimation and regeneration of this great landscape. Vanishing Spirits is an exhibition of photographs that brings together the work of three photographers; Pablo Bartholomew, Prabir Purkayastha and Amita Talwar; as they capture rare and dissipating modes of existence in the country. The artists isolate and draw upon social conditions and transforming landscapes – freezing in time studies of social constructs that make up India.

Prabir Purkayastha has spent almost two decades traveling through preciously disappearing areas of India, from the wilderness of Ladakh and Pushkar to the marginal communities in Bengal and Assam. Vanishing Spirits presents a subset of rare images that captures some of these remote and magical places.

Into the Light (left) spirits the values of traditional India. Purkayastha dims the background, spotlighting the figure in the heart of the picture. A man stands in the center of the photograph with his hands stretched outward reaching for the radiant light that descends down on him. He is not only embraced by this overwhelming presence of a higher being but in fact longs for it.

Pablo Bartholomew comes from Indian photography blue blood. His father Richard Bartholomew was an art critic and a photographer who captured some of the most amazing pictorials around the most celebrated community of Indian artists in time shortly after independence. Influenced by his father’s work, Bartholomew’s photographs pulsate with the energy of the urban in India. Mumbai is a particular muse to Bartholomew and continuing in this effort to explore transforming spaces, the exhibition presents a set of his photographs that provides a lens into a fading community of Parsis in Mumbai who at one time were a vital part of milieu of the city.

Rag Pickers (right) demonstrates the clash of a transitioning culture in some of India’s major developing Mecca’s. Revealing the conflict between the past and present colliding into one another as they transition and evolve into their own version of modern society. The artist captures a nomadic family walking towards the metropolis. The viewer is imbued with the concept that these nomads are simultaneously walking away from their past as they walk towards their unknown.

Amita Talwar’s photographs allow us the opportunity to take a step back for a broader brushstroke. They give us an expansive collection of images across the country of quiet and spiritual places.

Woman at the Door (below) depicts inanimate objects, such as a door and window melding with colors and patterns in the subject’s dress, creating a union of the usual with the unusual, the old with the new, the ancient with the modern, seemingly strewn together to exist cohesively in an uncertain state of human transition. Through her use of symbolism, she demonstrates to the viewer how civilization imprints its DNA for generations to come. These life impressions, whether in architecture, clothing, art, or patterns, stand as beacons of the ancient way of life.

Vanishing Spirits concludes its survey with additional works by these artists including landscapes, figures, and urban scenes.

Wendt Gallery hopes to bring a greater awareness of the influence that contemporary art plays in today’s global and shifting societies.

Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings

May 7th – June 12th, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, May 7th from 6 to 8 pm in the New York Gallery

Wendt Gallery is pleased to present Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings — the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York since 1992.

Born in Brooklyn in 1963, Matthews is a graduate of the New York’s High School of Art and Design. After earning a BFA from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Matthews moved back to New York in 1984 to set up his first studio on Saint Marks Place in the East Village. Inspired by artists Keith Haring and Richard Hambleton, who made the city streets and subways theirs, Matthews began to paint outdoor murals — especially on walls above parking lots where he could work at night undisturbed. In the studio, the artist credits the late Keith Haring with teaching him the finer points of stretching canvas. Matthews’ work from this period exhibits an eclectic array of influences from Ferdinand Leger to graffiti taggers.

Interested to expand beyond the solitary experience of studio painting, Matthews includes large installation work as a forum in which he can also express personal and socio-political commentary. He has enjoyed acclaim in particular for two large-scale, powerful installations: There’s Not One Day that Goes By I’m Not Reminded I’m a Black Man at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and Beyond Metamorphosis which occupied an entire pier at New York City’s Armory Show and a large stretch of Manhattan’s Battery Park in 2004.

Heart and soul, however, Victor Matthews is a studio painter. The technical challenges and emotional charge of his large-scale projects brings Matthews back to the studio invigorated and ready to paint. Inspired by the urban landscape, his ever-expanding personal iconography is pieced together in his paintings as if in a mosaic. Water towers, bicycles, fish, eyes, sneakers, fire hydrants and pigeons emerge from what appear at first glance to be abstract canvases. He has also always explored the spiritual and technical aspects of painting, influenced by an intriguing mix of painters from Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston and Francesco Goya to contemporaries Brice Marden and Francesco Clemente.

In his new body of work, Alter Ego Paintings, the artist begins each painting with his trademark graphite on canvas drawings. Like a Zen master, his hand moves unbidden across blank canvas until it stops. Next he applies a heavy impasto of white paint on a raw canvas that has been primed only with a transparent layer of rabbit skin glue. This heavy application of paint infuses the otherwise duo-tone canvases with depth and texture. Many collectors have noted that Matthews’ work reveals itself slowly and new imagery emerges in the work upon multiple viewings.

Matthews’ large pastels are a dramatic counterpoint to his significant fields of pure mosaic. Surprisingly serene and contemplative, yet chromatically vibrant, they glimmer like stained glass amidst a cathedral of white. Matthews’ work is included in the permanent collections of: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Nuova Icona Cultural Association for the Patronage of Contemporary Visual and Performing Arts, Venice, Italy; The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, Ohio; The New School University, New York, New York; Sala 1 - International Center for Contemporary Art, Rome, Italy.

Select private collectors include: Brice and Helen Marden, Francesco and Alba Clemente, Lord Nathaniel Rothschild and Russell Simmons.

Victor Matthews currently lives and works in New York's TriBeCa with his cat, Untitled.

Premier Exhibition of Southeast Asian Art comes to Wendt Gallery - New York

My World, Your World, Our World

When: Wednesday March 19 through April 30, 2010

Where: Wendt Gallery New York - 41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.wendtgallery.com

The newly opened Wendt Gallery of New York is proud to present a cornerstone of its gallery program with a survey of contemporary Indonesian art from the mid-20^th century to the present in an exhibition entitled “My World, Your World, Our World.” Timed to open during Asian Contemporary Art Week 2010, works by a select group of artists who are well known throughout Asia are being presented for the first time in the heart of New York at the landmark Fuller building. The Wendt Gallery is committed to bringing this vibrant niche of the contemporary art landscape to a wider audience.

i believed a miracle_thumb “My World, Your World, Our World,” the exhibition curated by gallery owner Serina Manqueros, follows on “Visions of Southeast Asia,” a show that Manqueros assembled for Wendt Gallery in Laguna Beach this past January. Mrs. Manqueros is developing the global gallery program for Wendt Galleries worldwide (New York, Laguna Beach, Singapore, Vienna), with a focus on Contemporary Southeast Asian art and Modernism.

“This has been our vision for several years,” Mr. Manqueros says. “There was no anchor for Contemporary Southeast Asian art in the West, so we decided to make this wonderful, powerful and compelling art a key component of our multi-gallery program. It is a burgeoning, energetic market.”

Most of the artists featured in the new gallery exhibition are from Indonesia, an archipelago of over 13,000 islands (6000 inhabitable) that is the world’s third largest democracy and largest Muslim nation. The turbulent socio-political landscape in Indonesia from WWII to the present (the country endured decades of repressive, authoritarian rule for 50 years before its first free parliamentary election in 1999) inspired an era of explosively charged and passionate work.

An exhibition highlight is the 5-part painting, “Holy Beer” by Augus Suwage (b. Indonesia 1959), perhaps the most highly regarded contemporary artist in Indonesia today. holy beer_thumb The work is an exploration of the infinite possibilities of self-portraiture - a central aspect of Mr. Suwage’s oeuvre. Suwage was awarded a residency at the Museum of Modern Art in Koshigaya-shi Saitama, Japan IN WHAT YEAR, a solo exhibition at the Gallery Avanthay Contemporary in Zurich, Switzerland in 2008 (“Beauty in the Dark”), and a retrospective show at the Jogja National Museum in Indonesia (“Still Crazy After All These Years”).

Also highly regarded and an auction house favorite, FX Harsono (b. Indonesia 1948) is represented in the Wendt show with two works, “Floating Between Threats” (2008) and “Deep in a Dream” (2010). Of Chinese descent (as is Suwage) in a country where there has been longstanding discrimination against this ethnic group, Harsono is noted for his unflinching examination of this theme in his artwork and performance art. The needles and butterflies seen in these two paintings also recur throughout his work as symbols of the dominion of power, and powerless beings, respectively. He was given a solo exhibition in 2007 at the prestigious Langgeng Icon Gallery in Indonesia.

in memorium_thumb The surrealist and eccentric style of Indonesian artist Agapetus Kristiandana (b. Indonesia 1968) is evident in the piece “In Memoriam.” Sometimes shocking, often humorous, Agapetus explores aspects of the human condition -- alienation, isolation and conflict -- through the depiction of animals, especially cows and pigs. Animal tales (and the worship of cows) figure prominently in Hinduism, which was the predominant religion in Indonesia before Islam (and its proscription of the consumption of pigs) became widespread there in the Middle Ages.

The exhibition also includes two paintings by Stefan Buana (b. Indonesia 1971), “My Flag Merah Puti” and “Indonesia My Country #2.” With a style both somber and symbolic, Buana’s paintings explore the tensions inherent in the dissonance between modernity and tradition and how this impacts life in Indonesia today. He has been exhibited in Indonesia and Singapore, most prominently with a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Jakarta in 2008.

Works by eight more artists complete the program.

Wendt Gallery is a full service art gallery specializing in Contemporary Southeast Asian art and Bauhaus-inspired Modernism. This exhibition of Contemporary Indonesian art is a first step towards igniting interest in this fast emerging and fascinating niche of the international art market.

Exhibition runs through April 30, 2010.

For more information, please call (877) 936-3838 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .