DEANNA SIRLIN "RED EYE LOVE:
New Paintings and Drawings"

+ gallery
2350 Lawrence Street
Denver, CO 80205
February 25 - April 10, 2006

"Red Eye Love", 2006, panoramic view of exhibition

In June of 2005, then + gallery director Gilbert I. Barrera made a trip to Venice, Italy to visit the famed Biennale of international contemporary art. He returned with a renewed view of the global marketplace, not to mention many stories, and additionally with a new artistic talent eager to expand her talents to the west. The Atlanta based artist Deanna Sirlin regaled Barrera both with her creative energy and magnetic personality. As Barrera delved further into the artist's career, he discovered a mature talent whose artwork crossed many boundaries in magnitude, dexterity and vivaciousness.

Sirlin received her MFA in Painting from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1980. A painter first and foremost, she has managed to develop a consistent, engaging motif and parlay it into large-scale, site-specific installations. "Retracings," her first work on a grand scale, was commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1999 and acquired in 2000 for the museum’s permanent collection. For the commission Sirlin installed 165 images of her abstract paint swirls, magnified by a power of 50 and output through the latest in digital technology, onto the windows on the front of the Richard Meier designed museum. The dramatic presentation brought a vibrant new view of paint and brushstroke to the community, and much acclaim to the consistently exhibiting artist.

Since then, Sirlin has been commissioned for other prominent sites and exhibitions such as the Triennial Exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2001 and the Department of Law of the Universita Ca' Foscari Venezia (University of Venice, Italy), run concurrently with the Venice Biennale in 2001. This installation, her first major exhibition in Europe, has become part of Ca’ Foscari's collection and is on permanent display. It is the acceptance by the Italian cognoscenti that brought Sirlin to her favorite stomping ground and the chance meeting with Barrera.

As a visionary multi-media and installation artist, Sirlin is certainly breaking new ground. It is her grounding as a painter that has brought her to prominence, and the basis for her exhibition at + gallery. An abstract expressionist to be sure, Sirlin's signature comes in the form of bold, gestural strokes and a potent mix of bright, deep colors, recently described by one publication as "unearthly." The works absolutely resonate, sometimes coming across as pure abstractions, other times as alien landscapes or multi-faceted portraits. The works in "Red Eye Love" utilize an elliptical form as a cohesive element, one which takes on many interpretations within each broad, confident gesture. Though certainly the connection with form and vision is an influence for the title, the deciding factor was admittedly the radiance of the old classic "Radar Love" that washed over Sirlin one day in the studio.

About her works, Sirlin declares

"Painting for me has always been like walking a tight rope between the world of pure unvarnished ideas and form. I often sway back and forth and lose my balance, but this is to my delight. I am a hybrid of painter and multiple other medias; my art is a wrestling match between the painted image made by my hand and the digital one that has been mediated by the technology. Technology has become my new eye and new tool to see with. My paintings these days reflect my view of life. When I am making a painting, the work has a particular pleasure of being which articulates itself in color, form and composition. The circles, eyes, planets dance around the surface. They float up and down, have small conversations, an occasional epiphany, and mostly hold a passion for living."

With a scale of work and titles that are fully life-affirming, the exhibition promises to be a wonderful respite to the drabness at the tail end of winter. It also will serve as an equally mood altering, fully engulfing installation that juxtaposes dramatically with the sedate, cerebral works of Johnson. + gallery is pleased to present two extremely talented and diverse artists to the Denver community.