Press Release

Ruth Bachofner Gallery is pleased to present Made in the Last Year of Hope, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Bruce Edelstein. There will be a reception for the artist Saturday, January 21, 4-6 PM.

For this exhibition, his first at the gallery, Bruce Edelstein brings together a group of intimately scaled works on paper. With this show, Edelstein departs from his usual sculptural practice which he has built over the course of almost 40 years, having shown throughout the United States and Internationally. Working with paper allows for more immediacy both in scale and process, yet the pieces maintain a visual kinship with sculpture. A sense of dimensional physicality that aligns with his background, resonates in the primarily abstract compositions, yet the influence of landscape figuration and urban forms and textures register as well. Despite the strong structural influence, the pieces project a certain whimsy that comes with the freedom of intuitively engaging with the weightless media of Japanese paper, dripping watercolor, collage, graphite and ink.

“Each piece in this recent body of work,” says Edelstein, “is a learning experience from the moment I start. I have no preconceived idea of what it should be. Once I make the initial decision to commit, with a scrap, silhouette, or a color, an intuitive dialogue ensues and the image starts to take form. Because each dialogue is only relevant for that particular piece, I can start fresh with each new work of art. There is no direction I have to explore, or a necessity for sequential development of a particular idea...This new work allows an intuitive and playful exploration of images that exist for themselves but may also invite a larger implication.”