Sandra Perlow

December 26, 2007

T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday guides confessional abstract paintings

Sandra Perlow: turn again

January 4 – February 2, 2008

Chicago---Alfedena Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by painter Sandra Perlow titled turn again, from January 4 – February 2, 2008. This is the artist’s first solo show at Alfedena Gallery.  A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, January 11, 5:00-8:00 p.m. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

The title of Sandra Perlow’s new exhibition, turn again, is drawn from a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday and underscores Perlow’s continuing use of Eliot’s own struggles with hope, faith, doubt and rebirth as a guide to pursue her own allusive and confessional abstract paintings that tackle uneven emotional and psychological terrain.

For Perlow who has been exhibiting since the late 70s, image-making has never been about stylistic trends but rather an urgent language for conveying, like Eliot, profound questions dealing with her own place in the world. As part of the generation deeply affected by the Women’s Movement, Perlow has always used her art to tackle issues of personal identity (daughter, mother, wife, artist) shaped by social structures. Echoing the work of painter Elizabeth Murray that made women’s domestic issues a theme worthy of bold painting in the 80s, Perlow began in the late 90s to create a hybrid visual language that blended her knowledge of the figure with her growing interests in the autobiographical potential of pattern and abstraction.   

The ten acrylic on canvas paintings in turn again display Perlow’s continuing practice of creating jarring spatial relationships as she collages decorative papers culled from her world travels with her own monotypes of boldly colored shapes inspired by cartoons, thrift store fabrics and the textures and colors of aging buildings. Choreographing with great deftness what appear to be discordant rhythms, Perlow builds the layers of her canvases with additional drawn gestures using the thick saturated lines of oil sticks to lend an improvisational immediacy to works that nonetheless are created with careful deliberation. The armature forms in the turn again works reflect Perlow’s recent visit to the Cambodian ruins of Angkor Wat and her fascination with the spatial enclosures that define this Khmer temple. A home for the gods ultimately consumed by the jungle reflects the compelling conflict between the forces of the spiritual and the physical world that drives Perlow’s paintings.

Sandra Perlow (born: Chicago, 1940) earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978, an MA from the Illinois Institute of Design, in 1968 and a BAE from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group shows and has been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, New Art Examiner and Art Today.

To view images of the exhibition visit the web site, www.alfedenagallery.com.

###