Art Brussels: Chris Bogia, Reuven Israel, Michael Stamm, and Summer Wheat

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present works by four New York-based artists: Chris Bogia, Reuven Israel, Michael Stamm and Summer Wheat.

Chris Bogia’s watercolors and sculptures employ visual strategies often utilized by interior designers, blurring the line where the decorative and psychological meet. Some of his imagery includes detached limbs that squirm and gesture; they both lazily reach, and discreetly defile, the carefully balanced domestic interiors marked by incense burners, bonsai, and pottery.

Reuven Israel proposes sculptures that are the sum of multiple possibilities—with regards to shape, scale, and pattern—within a single artwork. When the sculptures are set into one of their designated configurations, they often contain more negative space than mass – complicating the surrounding architecture, its shifting context, and the way it evokes the body.

Drawing at once from design, literature, history, and autobiography, Michael Stamm probes the need for genuine human relationships in a world that is somehow both increasingly interconnected and deeply alienated. Stamm’s paintings and drawings critically consider the popular tenets of our time with a wry sincerity, reconciling hope and skepticism in an era that requires large doses of both.

From a distance, Summer Wheat’s paintings appear to be tapestries with a woven or beaded surface, but upon closer inspection the materials are revealed: Paint is pushed through the small openings of aluminum mesh, creating a soft, textile-like form. Her figurative scenes aggrandize the invisible work of women by focusing on both their experience and their craft.