Gallery at The Boca Raton

Doug Argue’s vast canvases stuffed with shimmering, bullet-shaped forms have come to be known as the “fish paintings.” To guess a species is to miss the point, though the dense cramming-in of shapes suggests sardines. With only planes of silvery forms, the fish school depicted is the perspective of a fish, a portrait of the herd. The rendered world is both tamed and wild, familiar and entirely alien. 

One cannot look at Argue’s fish paintings without contemplating the intricate hours of their creation, without imagining the obsession that took hold and sustained itself until the moment in which they were first displayed. The intricacy of the fish paintings, their obsessiveness, like so much outsider art, is not madness, but a profound interest, a fascination that abides for a time, and then, like a wave, subsides. 

Boaz Vaadia’s style has evolved into figurative forms created with layers of chiseled stone and reflects the eternal relationship between man and nature. The figures appear as though created by natural forces, such as erosion by wind or water. He said, “By using the natural forces of rocks, my work awakens ancient ‘earth senses’ that were slowly abandoned by man during his evolution to civilization. By carving the stone, I release its inherent energies. Man came from the earth and in death returns to it. I see stone as the bone structure of the earth.”

Donald Martiny’s large scale brushstroke motif paintings suggest the gestural markings of paint applied directly to the wall – a tribute to the energetic motion of action painting.  To create these highly palpable textures, he mixes polymers with pigments and applies the mixture to sheets of aluminum, allowing the gesture to dictate the form.  He once described his practice as “a dance trapped in paint” and his dynamic works are a testament to his active process.

Working in both monumental and small dimensions since the 1970s, Gino Miles is inspired primarily by 20th century European masters.  He instills his love of the classical figure and objects found in nature, working with a sparse and contemporary language that embodies tranquility.  Stripped of an overt narrative, his abstract forms focus on elegant minimalism with clean lines and shapes.  These kinetic sculptures can be turned, rotated or spun, allowing the viewer to change the sculpture and experience it from a different viewpoint.  

New York School painter Alex Katz developed his highly stylized aesthetic in reaction to 1950s Abstract Expressionism, finding his own distinctive resolution between formalism and representation. His brightly colored figurative and landscape paintings are rendered in a flat style that takes cues from everyday visual culture like advertising and cinema, in many ways anticipating both the formal and conceptual concerns of Pop Art. Well known for his many portraits of his wife and muse, Ada, Katz has also dedicated himself to printmaking and freestanding sculptures of cutout figures painted on wood or aluminum.

What are we to make of Tigran Tsitoghdzyan's "Mirrors" — big, bold portraits, confrontationally large, and black and white, like the negative of a photograph, the colors of life enigmatically erased as though in a melancholy underworld? They are clearly masterpieces, but for all the beauty of the female model peculiarly bleak. However well-realized—empirically precise, insistently descriptive—her appearance, she seems peculiarly unreal. The hands that hide her face, yet let her piercing eyes magically see through them, suggest she is a delusion. Ambiguously transparent and opaque, her hands convey the ambivalence built into the artist's "handling" of her.

Michael Dweck is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist known for his narrative photographic and film projects. His work depicts the beauty and complexity of human life, while exploring on-going struggles between identity and adaptation within endangered societal enclaves. The artist says of his work, “I’m not a documentarian that explains a foreign world, not the insider bragging about his haunts, but rather a visual storyteller, who tries to transport and immerse you into a very particular cloistered cultural ecosystem and tells the stories of its characters in the process.” 

Dweck holds a degree in Fine Art from the Pratt Institute in New York. During his earlier career as a highly regarded creative director, Dweck received over forty international awards, including the coveted Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 

The artists' objective is to distill the stereotypical perceptions and associations within our culture into visually compelling objects, sculptures and installations. Whether they are creating an installation describing the impending doom of the dinosaurs or a valise filled with gold lucky charms, their iconography is drawn from the animals, objects and/or situations that operate as commonplace tropes within our culture. Berg & Myers take these generic stand-ins and invest them with multiple meanings through humorous allusions. The aesthetic decisions they make are informed by the consumer culture we inhabit and their desire to create ultra-smooth forms and high gloss finishes that seduce the viewer. Although each individual piece we create may be understood on it’s own terms, the pieces within each exhibition reinforce one another and manifest connections, which make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The stainless steel and aluminum sculptures created by Massachusetts artist, Rob Lorenson are a compositionally rich interplay of formalist elements.  They exist in suspended animation and are situated to freeze a moment in time; hovering effortlessly in space.  The work is constructed of sturdy, permanent materials but lives in contradiction to the impermanent sense of the composition.  He strives to emphasize the compositional qualities of the work, to create dynamic movement with static, solid objects.  

In 2002, Rob was commissioned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create two editioned works to be given as Awards to Innovator of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year.

James Austin Murray’s paintings are made using the most basic of means: ivory black oil paint, a canvas and wood-panel support, and wallpaper brushes—up to nine affixed to a long handle. But the surface effects are far from simple, and indeed offer an almost otherworldly experience, as the striations from the brush take the eye on a roller-coaster journey into pleats and folds, over light-struck hillocks and into shadowy crooks and bends. Depending on where you stand, the paintings look like a forbidding landscape you could walk right into. It’s a visual encounter that is both unsettling and profoundly seductive.