New ARTneo Gallery Looks to the Past and the Present

Celebrating the completion of a new space in 78th Street Studios, ARTneo opens its gallery with an exhibition of recent acquisitions to the permanent collection. Recent Acquisitions: 2012-2015 will be on display from May 15 – July 3. The selected works highlight and honor the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of ARTneo’s collection. The exhibition shows a shift in collection policies. While the Cleveland School remains paramount to the mission of the organization, many of the works acquired over the past several years are more contemporary. Works by ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, and painters Ana Arnold and Douglas Max Utter highlight the exhibition.

Thelma Frazier Winter (1905-1977) Abstraction, 1970 oil on masonite, 36 x 24.25 in.

Fractured Planes, the second exhibition presented by ARTneo in the new gallery, explores the abstraction and fragmentation of the pictorial plane. On display from July 17th through September 4th, a wide berth of time in Cleveland art is examined from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries. From Cubism and Futurism, to Op Art and hard-edge abstraction, the works illustrate how artists in Cleveland adapted and built upon innovative artistic concepts and formed a continuity of creative expression. By dividing and breaking up space to flatten reality, artists William Sommer and August F. Biehle set the stage for further developments by Paul Travis and William Grauer.

Moving from representation toward pure non-objective imagery, artists Thelma Frazier Winter and Edwin Mieczkowski both explore spacial depth. Using line and overlapping shapes, each artist develops a complex system of form. Winter utilizes color and shade to create a sense of space, while Mieczkowski uses solid black and white shapes to create a two-dimensional composition, broken up by overlaid constructed forms to shatter the perceived work into three-dimensionality.

Both reality and non-objective abstraction collide in more current works by artists such as Mark Keffer and Dante Rodriguez. Each of these artists make use of geometric forms mixed with referential depictions of identifiable subject matter. The figure or the landscape are present in the works by these artists, often broken up by hard-edged geometry. Linear forms fragment the representational elements to create a hybrid of movements firmly planted in the contemporary scene. Fractured Planes brings together these diverse works to explore stylistic development, and examine a Cleveland tradition in geometric abstraction.