Affordable Art Fair New York City
September 21 – 25, 2011
7 W New York
7 West 34th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10010

Peng Gallery - AAF press release
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Just because something is cheap, doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Take the internationally renowned and self-explanatory Affordable Art Fair of original works by living artists held in far flung reaches of the globe. From Amsterdam to Singapore, the AAF has branded itself as the art world’s gentle enabler with some of the most complex works sold at easy-to-acquire prices.
The AAF isn’t a discounter. It’s a gateway drug.
 
Whenever alluring complexity is up for grabs, expect to see the Peng Gallery selling its carefully curated wares.
For the New York City Fall edition of the Affordable Art Fair, Jason Peng’s gallery offers a diverse palate of artists’ works. Sachiko Yoshimiya’s motionless walls of pastoral color drift in ascension onto a gauzy field of vision where depth of field is starkly demarcated by masking tape. Less harsh is Philadelphia’s Murray Dessner who offers boldly blended planes of harmony and color that have been regarded as a sort of “abstract impressionism” by those who’ve breathed in his work. Hisako Kobayashi’s washes of color and texture are muddled, muted and have a delicious sonic quality within each of her works. Tomoro Kawai’s oils on canvas paintings may seem soft and abstract but each puzzling blurred figure is a divine totem – a dichotomy that heightens every drama within.
If AAF is the gateway, the Peng Gallery offers the ultimate high.
 
A.D. Amorosi
Philadelphia, July 2011

 

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Peng Gallery - Recent inventory

Work Titles:

Search, The Bliss, Last Horizon, and Mountain Series #18

 

Hisako Kobayashi works intuitively, creating dreamlike landscapes that suggest ambient states indicative of both landscape and feeling. Both "Search" and "The Bliss" assert a subtle glow that shifts in the viewer’s eye like the slightest ripple of water. Poetic and haunting, "Search" shows us that her pentamenti are born of emotion, in which depth of vision and feeling become similar to the point of unity. In this work Kobayashi shows us that she brilliantly combines her Asian sensibility with her Western training. "The Bliss", remarkable for its soft sifts of color, opens up for contemplation of its subtleties, which demand extended interaction and an open mind. Together, the paintings meditate, in Asian fashion, upon the ineffable, but they also show Kobaysahi’s profound understanding of Western painting.

 

Murray Dessner paints large canvases filled with color and light. He is a painter who reaches, in the abstract expressionist manner, for the abstract sublime; however, his thick applications of paint also display a nuanced feeling for landscape. In "Last Horizon", we see the marvelous gradations of color that express the way the day ends—beginning with a luminous yellow at the bottom of the canvas, gradually changing from yellow to orange to a fiery red in the top half of the composition. Like Rothko’s paintings, "Last Horizon" can be understood in two basic ways—as brilliant records of the light in a landscape, and as equally accomplished explorations in color-field abstraction. Both readings work successfully, proving Dessner to be a highly accomplished painter in his field.

 

Quan Handong is a Chinese painter intent on contemporizing the great tradition of Chinese ink painting. In the vertical, scroll-like work "Mountain Series #18", Quan brilliantly approximates the effects of a mountainous landscape, reiterating ink forms with small spots of color. These vertically rising shapes are presented randomly across the white paper, creating a pleasing, contrapuntal rhythm that make them seem nearly as though they are dancing. Of course, the effects may also be read as abstract, black knots of brush marks that randomly repeat themselves. Quan’s painting reminds us that even when the Chinese image suffices in its realism, abstraction is part of the equation.

 

Jonathan Goodman
New York City, August 2010