Mark Hadjipateras: City Dwellers; James Woodruff: Language in Line

Denise Bibro Fine Art is pleased to announce two concurrent solo exhibitions, Mark Hadjipateras, City Dwellers, in Gallery I and James Woodruff, Language in Line, in Gallery II, from November 17th – December 23rd, with an opening reception November 17th from 6 to 8pm.

Freestanding, biomorphic, anthropomorphic, robotic and sometimes entomic creatures cast in fiberglass and coated in a broad spectrum of glossy auto-body paint are just some of the characters occupying Mark Hadjipateras’ world. On the surface, Hadjipateras’ works appear comedic but there is always an underlining seriousness and substance in his projected characters and the world they inhabit. Many of his human-like objects possess physical idiosyncrasies, with gender body characteristics, while they are at the same time featureless.

City Dwellers were first presented in the 2002 permanent mural installation; a project commissioned for the MTA for New York’s 28th Street N/R station. Over the past few decades, Hadjipateras’ universal world of characters and environments infer modernist and minimalist traditions while simultaneously suggesting a continuance in the future informed by science, science fiction, animation, movies and cartoons. City Dwellers can be anywhere, particularly in New York and/or Greece where the artists lives and works.

Language in Line suggests a communicable relationship between the seen and unseen, audible and silent. James Woodruff’s manifests this in his most recent paintings, which pulsate with energy and fluidity. Woodruff is fascinated with an image having the power to reveal something clearly, familiar, that creates visual and experiential dialogue and connection.

Colors co-inhabit Woodruff’s muted backgrounds, creating shapes which float through space. At times, the forms melt; lines converge, diverge and exist on variant spatial planes. The connection of marks creates a visual language which evokes an experience from the viewer. The communication between color and line that we intuitively understand facilitates the viewer’s experience to converge this visual language on different levels, the meaning of which may be in sync with the viewer or provoke further dialogue.

Hadjipateras’ work has been shown in many international contexts, most recently in solo exhibitions at 12 star gallery, London, and a.antonopolou.art, Athens. In 2008, a large-scale retrospective exhibition was presented at the Municipal Gallery of Athens. The artist is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Dakis Joannou Collection (Athens), among others. In 2002, the artist was commissioned by the Municipal Arts Society of New York and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a permanent installation in New York’s 28th Street subway station.

Woodruff has an extensive background in both painting and photography, and worked from 1977 to 1980 as the assistant to Irving Penn. His work has been exhibited in New York City at the Manasse-Chelsea DAK Gallery; and at venues in Connecticut including the Bachelier/Cardonsky Gallery in Kent; the John Slade Ely House in New Haven; and The Silo in New Milford. His work was selected on numerous occasions for the Rose Algrant Show, an annual memorial exhibition staged at various alternative locations in Cornwall, CT, in honor of artist Rose Algrant. He holds degrees from the Marist Brothers and Oxford Colleges, both in Johannesburg, South Africa, and studied at the Art Students League in New York City.