Alan Loehle - Metaphors & Symbols

January 8, 2009 - February 14, 2009
Opening Thursday, January 8, 7:00-9:00 pm
263 Walker Street • Atlanta, Georgia 30313
404/827-0030 • info@marciawoodgallery.com

The Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Alan Loehle created during his Guggenheim Fellowship.

The paintings are a continuation of Alan’s previous work, drawing on singular powerful images that serve as metaphors for the fragility and transience of life, reminders of why we should pay attention to the ephemeral nature of living.  These new paintings have a shimmering resonance that is mysterious and provocative and invite the viewer to confront the beauty and raw elegance of human existence.  These works ask us if we can exist alone with our vulnerabilities, then usher us to the threshold of our own instinctual humanity where we can find sympathy and innocence in response to the pathos of the fleeting moment.

The new Rome series of drawings embrace with bold immediacy the way the human experience is woven together across culture and time. These drawings approach similar existential themes as in the paintings, this time asking if we can exist in a complex world of allusion, custom, and shared memory, thus reinventing the inward journey of Alan’s paintings through twists and scratchings and bouncings of richly layered symbols.  Where the paintings capture and save a moment, preserving it against the movement of time, the new drawings envelop us in a wealth of universal imagery, suggesting that no moment is ever completely lost, but packed densely into our experience as an affirmation of life.

This series is the result of time spent in Italy during the Guggenheim Fellowship, where he was inspired to explore new vocabularies in his work. Imagery includes symbols of fertility and death, the Belvedere Torso, the phallic exit sign for the brothel outside the Coliseum, animals from the Rome zoo, gypsies, and graffiti from bridges over the Tiber River.