The Grunwald Gallery of Art is pleased to announce Small is Big, an exhibit of painting by five contemporary painters. Small is Big celebrates the virtues of painting on a small scale through the work of five of its practitioners—Catherine Kehoe, EM Saniga, Ken Kewley, Eve Mansdorf, and Tim Kennedy. Each artist will give a lecture about their work beginning Tuesday, October 16 and will end in a panel discussion on Friday, October 19 at the Grunwald Gallery. Please visit our website for a full schedule of lectures. The exhibition will open to the public with a reception held on Friday, October 19, 6:00–8:00pm.
Small paintings are capable of producing a powerful effect on viewers while communicating intimacy. The viewer becomes intensely aware of their own space as well as the space in the painting. We see the artist’s hand in the marks on the surface of the panel or canvas that magically transform themselves at the same instant into a house or a flower—and then back again. It is an endless circuit that produces the hypnotic illusion of stopped time. Small works also permit the pleasure of touch. The scale allows the artist to vicariously caress the things he or she paints.
Since the invention of photography, the notion of bearing direct witness has become a blurred category for painters. After all, Courbet, the man who declaimed, “Show me an angel and I will paint one”, sometimes used photographs as a source for his paintings. Although both Kehoe and Saniga paint from life, both also on occasion refer to photographic sources. Kennedy and Mansdorf carry forward the tradition that works directly from the motif. Kewley uses the motif as a source of inspiration for brief, intense periods and as a point of departure for unknown destinations of formal invention on other occasions.
Catherine Kehoe is represented by Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston and has received several awards including the Lilian Orlowski and William Freed Foundation Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust Grant. EM Saniga, who is also a professor of Information Technology at the University of Delaware, was trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art where he studied with Seymour Remenick among others. He currently shows at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York. Ken Kewley has exhibited at Lori Bookstein Gallery in New York and internationally. Eve Mansdorf received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College in 1990. She has exhibited her work at First Street Gallery and at Gallery Henoch in New York and currently teaches in the painting program at Indiana University. Tim Kennedy received his MFA from Brooklyn College and he attended the Skowhegan School. Articles on his paintings have appeared in American Artist and Watercolor magazines and he is the recipient of two Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grants. He also currently teaches painting at Indiana University.
This exhibition is supported by the College of Arts and Humanities Institute.