Archie Rand, Motet #1, 2013, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic, enamel and fabric on canvas.
BravinLee is very pleased to exhibit the Motets, a series of 20 paintings by Archie Rand, after the poems of Eugenio Montale. Schedule: October 28-31 and November 4-7, 12-5pm. Appointments encouraged. For further information or to make an appointment please email us at [email protected]
“What you see is not what you see” – Philip Guston
Rand had previously responded to the work of Nobel Prize winning author, Eugenio Montale in a series of paintings (“Men Who Turn Back”) and then in 2013 Rand again engaged Montale’s formidable “Motets”, a group of 20 love poems that Montale seems to be mouthing into the air as they are addressed to a departed lover. In these poems a bombardment of imagery attempts to fill the negative space around an unhealed pain, the avenue to which Montale needed to, in futility, keep open. Rand’s pictorial armature derives from Giorgio De Chirico’s parallel entropy, which shares a spirit of the unfulfilled. Long recognized as a masterful artist, Rand brings the full force of his invention and lyricism to these works.
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The Archie Rand collaboration with the poet David Shapiro has its roots in their shared experience of growing up in New York City and being maverick teen prodigies. In his mid-teens Rand played piano professionally with artists who were to become major stars and, at the age of 17, was showing at the legendary Tibor de Nagy Gallery - and Shapiro, in high school performed as a violin soloist under Leopold Stokowski and at the age of 16 had published a major book of poetry that received praise from John Ashbery and Jack Kerouac.
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