SILVIA LEVENSON, LORRAINE PELTZ + NICOLE SCHMOELZER

Image credits:
Above left: Nicole Schmoelzer. Staining 1109-132, 2010. Oil on Linen, 70 x 60 in.
Above right: Lorraine Peltz. Chandelier Black, 2010. Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 40 x 40 in.
Silvia Levenson. Life Strategies, 2009. Installation: Glass, found object, video. 70 x 70 in.
Opening 2 March
Reception 4 March
Exhibition through 1 May

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - 21 February 2010 (for immediate release)
Micaëla Gallery is proud to present "SILVIA LEVENSON, LORRAINE PELTZ + NICOLE SCHMOELZER," a multi-media exhibition showcasing artworks by three talented artists, Silvia Levenson (Italy), Lorraine Peltz (Chicago), and Nicole Schmoelzer (Switzerland), whose work takes a unique approach to issues of women's fantasies, ideas of beauty, and modern day living interpreted through mediums of sculpture, paint, and video.

Lorraine Peltz's recent paintings are complex ruminations on the nature of private identity and public persona. Using imagery culled from both personal history and the contemporary moment, they reference both past and present. The image of a chandelier conjures a remembered culture and the patterned flowers, starbursts, and decorative flourishes present the now - particularly women's fantasy and desires - through pure painterly pleasure.

Nicole Schmoelzer works with paint on linen and paper, developing a number of series whose topic is the very behavior of color itself. In Schmoelzer's paintings, the color yellow plays in important role. As she states, "...partly because it is extremely difficult to replicate, its presence an act of resistance to the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction... It is also an evocative color with a wide range of associations, foremost of which, perhaps, is light: like sun breaking through, implying heat, energy, life."

Silvia Levenson's sculpture presents a dark and comic vision of modern home life, by re-fashioning house wares and pharmaceuticals in candy-colored glass. In her work, a standard IKEA chair with a kiln-cast seat is placed on a floor of fused, iridescent glass tiles, sandblasted with the names of common antidepressants. The pastel colors used by Levenson for the tiles convey a certain idea of calm and relaxation, in contrast to the names of medicines. In the background, there is a projected video piece, "Everything is OK," which she made with her daughter, Natalia Saurin.