John Torreano: Gold Gems Balls

Opening May 11th and on view through June 11th, The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present "John Torreano | Gold Gems Balls." This is the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the artist who has a longstanding studio practice on Long Island’s East End, as well as in New York and Abu Dhabi where he is a professor at both NYU Steinhardt and NYU Abu Dhabi. A separate press release is available for the concurrent exhibition, "Gustavo Bonevardi | New Watercolors."

"Gold Gems Balls" highlights selected paintings on plywood and sculpture dating from 1984 to 1990 when John Torreano was among a group of American artists using wood in unprecedented ways to blur the distinction between painting and sculpture. Integral to his work in all mediums is a fascination with cosmological imagery and the paradox between illusionism and the physicality of his working materials. Inset into his painted reliefs and sculptures, luminous acrylic gems, painted and natural wood spheres, and routered hollows enhance the surface plane to suggest stars and planets or sheer abstract pictorial space. Throughout, in a process that incorporates painting, cutting, sanding and assemblage, beauty and rougher aesthetics converge in a seductive merging of apparent opposites.

See below for full press release.