Artists’ Gallery is pleased to present “Ideal Forms,” an exhibition featuring the art of Alan J. Klawans and Andrew Werth. The show runs from Thursday, November 6, through Sunday, November 30, 2014. A reception with the artists will be held at the gallery (18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, NJ) from 3 p.m. – 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 8, 2014.
In “Ideal Forms,” their fourth exhibition together at Artists’ Gallery, Alan J. Klawans and Andrew Werth explore numbers and math through geometric (Klawans) and organic (Werth) abstraction.
Werth’s acrylic paintings include “Reality Construction #1 and #2,” two paintings composed of “impossible triangles” with regular but subtle progressions of color spanning thousands of hand-painted brushstrokes. For “Balance,” Werth wrote a computer program that uses principles of physics to help him design a painting with a balance of squares and circles within the picture plane. He also includes several “Turing Pattern” paintings, based upon the patterns in nature proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing. Werth simulates the underlying physical process on the computer before realizing the designs in paint on aluminum panels.
“I’ve long been interested in consciousness, perception, and cognitive science,” Werth explains. “Most of my paintings in this exhibition are related – abstractly and metaphorically – to the mystery of how we go about making sense of the world.”
Klawans takes a non-literal approach to numbers in his series, “The Visualization of Numbers One to Ten.” Through intuitive rather than typographic means, Klawans constructs geometric abstractions that regard numbers as something more than a counting system. “Since I was a child, I felt that certain numbers had a distinct color appearance,” he says. “Each number also has an abstract quality as well as a geometric structure that I try to express in these works.”
Klawans received his formal art training in the 1950s and the era still has an influence on him, with hints of jazz album covers and abstract expressionism showing up in his work today. His means of production, however, is thoroughly contemporary: the computer is his primary tool for creating his numerically inspired original digital prints.
Alan J. Klawans is an award-winning artist whose work is included in the collections of many prominent institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Before his long career as a designer and art director, he studied graphic design at the Philadelphia College of Art. Klawans lives in Willow Grove, PA.
Andrew Werth received degrees in Computer Engineering and Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University and has studied art at various schools in New York City including The Arts Students League, The School of Visual Arts, and The New School. His paintings have been exhibited at many tri-state venues from Philadelphia to New York. Werth lives in West Windsor, NJ.
Artists’ Gallery is located at 18 Bridge Street, Lambertville, New Jersey. Gallery Hours are Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun from 11am-6pm or by appointment.
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