tiffanycalvert@gmail (.com)

press release
new paintings by tiffany calvert
at LISA BOYLE GALLERY, January 12 - February 16, 2008

The gallery is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of paintings by artist Tiffany Calvert.

Tiffany Calvert's work is concerned with the disparity of representational and abstract space in painting. In her current series of paintings, Calvert borrows from her previous studies of representational space (that of highly ordered Victorian architecture and museum dioramas) and combines it with the measured chaos of imposed abstract gesture-making. Forcing the two efforts to co-exist in the same painting, Calvert illustrates her effort to understand the construction and consequently deconstruction inherent in both nature and in painting itself.

In the new paintings, Calvert's interest in photographs of the recently decimated homes of New Orleans serve as a genesis for the scenes of destruction in her new work. They are a literal representation of the unpredictability of nature and its power, mimicked in the work as a struggle between representation and the imposition of disorderly, emotional abstraction. As in the painting Nola #3, Calvert begins as she has in the last two years with an historical architectural relic, transcribed with technically assured style (in this case, a chandelier). She then takes a drastic turn from her painstaking rendering of the rest of the scene and instead turns it on its head and endeavors to use the rest of the painting as a struggle with the formal elements of the paint itself. Specific elements fall into abstract tableaus, block of color against color, and paint competing with paint. The result is a series of epic and tumultuous record of the artist's relationship with her subject.

Calvert is currently included in an exhibition at Lawrimore Projects in Seattle and has exhibited at Finesilver Gallery in Texas. An exhibition curated by her, "Some Abstraction Occurs", is running concurrently in Chicago at 65GRAND Gallery, opening Friday, January 12.

Tiffany Calvert –comments by Simone Yehuda
Tiffany Calvert is a powerful and eloquent artist who is at ease with ambiguity. Deer heads and massive oxen are juxtaposed with abstract landscapes or backdrops and exquisitely rendered ornate architectural flourishes. In some cases, as with her “Untitled (Yellow Room),” she is reminiscent of such old masters as Jan van Eyk’s “The Arnolfini Marriage,” or Jean-Auguste Ingres’ “The Bather” in her painting’s technical virtuosity, miniature detail, and inspired observations of incongruity of image, style and period. Perhaps most astonishing about this piece is that it literally, wittily, and elegantly heralds itself as a masterpiece.

A recent MFA graduate of Rutgers University, Calvert signals the appearance of a remarkable new painter on the New York scene. Her work – previously displayed in a variety of New York, Miami, Houston, Jersey City, and Newark galleries – is represented by the Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago, where she has already, at the age of 31, mounted three one-person exhibitions (2007, 2006, and 2004). Her portfolio to date consists of paintings displaying an astonishing range of subject matter and aesthetic references, including dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, images of domination from Roosevelt’s mansion and hunting trophies, turn of the century reapers on the Great Plains, Manifest Destiny, the Great Depression, and ornate architecture, to name only a few. This diversity in no way deflects from her mastery of style, notable for its visionary intelligence mingled with meticulous skill and irresistible artistry.
In some of her earlier works, such as “Untitled (Two Deer),” Calvert employs a visual pun by juxtaposing dioramas – which already contain both two dimensional and three-dimensional elements – with illusory and flat elements in order to play with space. As Calvert explains, “By suggesting an illusionistic form and then flattening it out, I intend to create an argument in space, a technique I also developed in a later painting, “Untitled (Chandelier #1),” where I push and pull, or weave together, various elements so that the two- and three-dimensional spaces flip back and forth rather than simply being placed side by side.” Another exquisite painting, “Untitled (Chandelier #2),” manages to simultaneously convey simplicity and complexity. A stark, realistically-wrought rococo chandelier is for grounded against an abstractly patterned carpet whose intriguing patterns of blue, gray, and tan dramatically off set the chandelier’s austere iron symmetry in lyrical counterpoint.
Other noteworthy pieces include “Untitled (Two Deer),” which portrays Greek columns coterminous with dioramas; “Untitled (Oulton),” almost photographic in its elaborate black and white architectural inscape with eight startlingly displayed mounted deer heads; “Untitled (Drakelow”)’s dark, intriguing and masterful outdoor still life dining room; and “Untitled (Shillinglee #2”)’s simultaneously mysterious and majestic abstract neo-classicism.
As of July 1, 2007, Calvert’s new studio will be located in Gowanus, NY, at 98 Fourth Street. If two such recent paintings as “Untitled (Hand)” and “Untitled (Field)”are any indication, we have a great deal more to look forward to from this powerful, challenging, and surprisingly mature painter.

-Simone Yehuda, poet and critic