3:37 p.m., March 16, 2009----Landscape Today: 5 Perspectives will be on display at the University Gallery of the University of Delaware from March 18 to April 26.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

The exhibition features 46 paintings by five artists - Diana Horowitz, Constance LaPalombara, Ginger Levant, Joan Nelson and Bonnie Levinthal - who have been working in a variety of media, with widely differing concerns, to epitomize the richness of landscape painting today.

There will be an opening reception for the gallery on Wednesday, March 18, from 5-7 p.m. All students and members of the UD community are invited to attend. LaPalombara, Levant and Levinthal will attend and speak briefly about their works.

Horowitz has selected oil on linen as the chosen media for her abstractions and her distillation of industrial and urban scenes. Her paintings hold abstraction and representation in delicate balance.

She will have 10 paintings featured in the exhibition, including Woolworth Building, Summer Day (2007, 16 x 8), which portrays the grays, yellows and pale greens of the landmark Woolworth Building as they betray the heat of a summer day.

LaPalombara explores the atmospheres and moods of deserted New Haven streets through nine of her oil on linen paintings that will be displayed in the exhibition.

From the window of her studio and other buildings in downtown New Haven, LaPalombara explores the tensions between abstract volume and city's three-dimensional space, marking the particular time of day, quality of light as it plays across the streets, buildings and skyline.

Levant's large oil canvases render sun-drenched scenes, 150 years after the first European plein-air painters did. The six paintings that will be at the exhibition feature a motif of the seemingly timeless views of both the American and European countryside.

Levant captures the most ephemeral of natural effects, often anchored by - and living in idyllic coexistence with - the man-made. Her paintings result from multiple visits over several days.

Contrasting with the expansive views of Levant, the 11 works that Nelson will have featured at the exhibition encourage close looking, one viewer at a time, for an intimate experience. Her indebtedness to older masters is often mentioned and reinforced by the distressed surfaces of her paintings.

Nelson also creates three-dimensional boxes that feature a layered scene on multiple panes of painted glass. Seeing through the space is arduous, and three-dimensional objects might also threaten our passage into distant light. She creates a visual parallel to the physical experience of walking through the imagined space.

Levinthal plays with the ironies of scale in her oil and beeswax on wood works, as the works of the Mapping series open a view onto a distant topography, sensed, rather than seen, through transparent layers of shifting color. A trip to Italy in 2006 inspired this series, as she began to consider the re-presentation of landscape through history, in paintings, topographical views, and sixteenth-century maps. She will have 10 works at the exhibition.

Levinthal's multilayered works provide a visual metaphor for the overlapping and fusion of nature, history and meaning, as representation, experience, and memory overlap and become fused and confused.

The University Gallery is housed in Old College on the University of Delaware campus in Newark. Hours are Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday evenings until 8 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays 1-4 p.m.

For information, call (302) 831-8037 or visit the Web site.

The exhibition will be closed from March 28 to April 7 for spring break.

Article by Jon Bleiweis