Anya Kielar: WOMEN

For Immediate Release:
Anya Kielar: WOMEN
September 9 – October 21, 2012 Opening Reception: September 9, 6-8 pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present a show of new work by Anya Kielar. For her second solo show at the gallery, Kielar will exhibit a series of large-scale fabric pieces in which she continues her ongoing investigation of the female form. The artist’s interest in an intimate, hand- intensive and deeply immersive studio process merges in this body of work with her attraction to theatrical display. Drawing upon a set of disparate sources and traditions, from avant-garde set design to domestic folk crafting techniques, Kielar’s ornate installation seeks to arrest the viewer, engaging her in a shared moment of beauty.

In a group of staggered, floating hangings that are suspended between the floor and ceiling of the gallery, such that they are facing the entering viewer head on, each piece stands on its own but also, in its sheerness, incorporates others to form a textured, multidimensional collage within the space. In these works, Kielar employs a variety of fabric treatment techniques to depict various female figures. Whether using her kitchen stovetop to custom dye burlap, and then manipulating the burlap’s fibers to form bodies and faces, objects and patterns, applying a self-taught Devore technique to velvet, or painting on linen, the artist’s process is both intuitive and highly intensive. Much like in her earlier sand painting reliefs, Kielar is interested in consistently learning, developing and mastering new studio processes, and pushing them through to their furthest aesthetic conclusion.

Boxed and stretched within wooden frames, Kielar’s hanging women are both protected and vulnerable, cultivated and primitivist, contemporary and archaic, slightly hindered by their display but also—often literally, and always metaphorically—larger than life. The idiosyncratic, sensitive presence of the artist’s hand is what lends them, always, their undeniable power.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Rachel Uffner Gallery has published a full color 48-page catalogue which will be available at the gallery.

Anya Kielar has exhibited solo projects at Daniel Reich Gallery, NY, Casey Kaplan, NY, and Locust Projects, Miami, and has participated in group shows at 176, Zabludowicz Collection, London, PortugalArte10, Portugal, Guild & Greyshkul, CANADA, White Columns and Museum 52 in NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in Brooklyn.