Agora Gallery Presents Mélange of Milieu: Defying Category

February 14 – March 7, 2017
6 – 7PM

Chelsea’s Agora Gallery will feature the original work of New York artist Sa Peng in Mélange of Milieu. The exhibition opens February 14, 2017 and runs through March 7, 2017 with an opening reception on Thursday, February 16, 6-8 pm.

Featured Artists

Mélange of Milieu

Anna Voloshko | MORLOT Claude | Doris Brown | Yuliya Pogreb | HERMINE | Sa Peng | Yoshiko Kanai | Rita Galambos | Stacie Hernandez | Michael Alberon

About the Exhibition

Mélange of Milieu: Defying Category

This February Agora Gallery presents Mélange of Milieu, a group exhibition highlighting the newest ways to bend genre practiced by artists working today. The eight featured artists hail from the Ukraine, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and the United States - among others - yet have much to say to each other. The hazy, Impressionistic landscape paintings on one wall seem to both inform and take cues from the brash figural paintings on the next. Mélange of Milieu is unique in the current crop of gallery shows for featuring sculpture as prominently as painting, or indeed any works on paper. The exhibition makes a conscious effort to include a range of three-dimensional works, the result being an unusually revealing look at the field. There are highly realistic bronze figurines of invented animals, sleek and gestural depictions of the moving body in stone, and assemblages of brightly colored wooden blocks that have been both painted and embroidered, in a way, to evoke the patterns of the cosmos.

About the Artist

While Sa Peng works in mediums that range from woodblock prints to sculpture, she says that oil painting is the “primary language” she uses in her work. In her images, the soft, rich colors that oils provide are used in a surprisingly powerful way. Creating strikingly textured abstract works as well as intimate portraits of people, the artist is skilled at balancing those soft tones with bursts of bright color or sharply rendered effects of light and shadow, leading the viewer’s eye through the image and giving each scene or human subject a strong sense of life. That feeling of life is further enhanced by Peng’s eye for line and composition. Each painting has a firmly grounded sense of space and proportion, bringing the viewer into the artist’s world. Expressing that world is central to her process. “I draw on my personal memories, emotions and experiences,” she says, “treating them as residents in my imaginary world and allowing them to develop organically on their own.” That complex interaction between artist and subject gives her paintings their unique, dynamic quality. Born in 1993 in mainland China, Sa Peng moved to Vancouver, Canada when she was 14 years old. She came to New York alone in 2012, where she currently lives and works.

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