Sat, March 9, 2019 - Sat, April 27, 2019

Douglas Flanders & Associates presents a unique exhibition of portrait paintings by 8 Twin Cities-based artists, each with an individually masterful approach.

This exhibition features the original portrait painting styles of Kristie Bretzke,Todd Clercx, Louise Gillis, Luke Hillestad, Richard Kochenash, Jeffrey T. Larson, Steven J. Levin and Lois Rhomberg. All are masters at capturing the essential character of their subjects in unique ways.

The tradition of portrait painting in the West dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. From early heroic and idealistic representations to later realistic depictions, portraiture was key to recording the human presence. Portrait painting style has continued to evolve through the centuries, and still today offers more varied expressive opportunities than the flatness of photographs.

Kristie Bretzke displays her expertise in using light to evoke emotion and mood in her portraits. Classical but contemporary and straightforward, her portraits engage the viewer on numerous levels by stirring up compassion for her subjects, revealing their strengths, and even suggesting individual worldviews through their eyes.

Todd Clercx is a contemporary impressionist, he brings out the light emanating from the colors of everyday life. Each of his expressive portraits is as distinct as the individuals in them. Clerx captures the personality and life in his subjects, allowing us to feel we really know them.

Louise Gillis is a classically trained painter who uses her knowledge of impressionistic color theory to create vibrancy and depth in her intimate portraits.

Luke Hillestad employs the limited palette of 4th century master Apelles of Kos (earth-based white, yellow, red and black) to paint portraits that seem to breathe with individual vitality. His skilled use of chiaroscuro offers potential for narrative and mystery.

Richard Kochenash, a plein air artist whose oil paintings capture his surroundings with gestural impressionistic force. In his portrait paintings he complements his knowledge of his subjects with preliminary photographs to reveal a sense of time and expression in each individual.

Jeffrey T. Larson is a classically trained artist renowned for adeptly capturing in his paintings the simple and beautiful pleasures of contemporary life. His portraits are luminous, painterly, open and fresh.

Steven J. Levin is Classical Realist painter trained in traditional atelier techniques similar to those of 19th century Paris. With a deep reverence for beauty and a thorough understanding of light and form, Levin’s paintings reveal his keen sense of space, dimension and atmosphere.

Lois Rhomberg paints people in large and small format, emphasizing their life spirit as well as their physical presence. Her portraits are known for their sensitive drawing, lively color and emotional presence.

Numerous paintings by each artist are displayed in the exhibition, creating a veritable salon-style emporium of approaches to the portrait. Such a contemporary approach to presenting the time-honored tradition of portraiture is unique to the history of gallery exhibitions in the Twin Cities. Commissions are encouraged and can be arranged through Douglas Flanders & Associates.

Douglas Flanders & Associates is pleased to present new fantasy-charged still life paintings by Bruce Nygren.

With origins as a plein air landscape painter, Bruce Nygren decided to introduce fantastical floating objects into his compositions. Thus began the body of signature works, where by classic mechanical and stuffed toys are featured in still life arrangements that are surreal yet contemplative. Sometimes landscape elements are introduced. Each of his paintings reveal human warmth and humor.
 
A longtime resident of south Minneapolis’s Longfellow neighborhood, Nygren has been painting fascinating arrangements of vintage toys and other objects he has collected since his days as a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Like many an art student he was drawn to the trove of visual stimuli in antique and thrift stores.

For its Summer exhibition Douglas Flanders & Associates brings together five of Minnesota’s best plein air painters: Scott Lloyd Anderson, Todd Clercx, Michele Combs, Donald Holzschuh and Robert Matheson.
 
Plein air painting is about leaving the studio to experience sketching and painting outdoors in the landscape. The practice goes back for centuries, but was made into an art form by the French Impressionists of the late 1800’s. Their desire to paint light and its changing, ephemeral qualities, coupled with the creation of transportable paint tubes and the collapsible box easel allowed artists the freedom to paint en plein air, the French expression for in the open air

Douglas Flanders & Associates announces a colorful Winter exhibition bonanza of artworks by both locally/regionally based artists and globally recognized artists. Installed salon style in two different spaces. The 818 West Lake Street space is exhibiting works by internationally known artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, James Rosenquist, Donald Sultan and Wayne Thiebaud. American women artists experiencing a resurgence in the global market are represented as well. Included are artworks by March Avery, Emily Cheng, Nancy Haynes, Jacqueline Humphries, Shirley Kaneda and Pat Steir. Exhibited in the 908 West Lake Street space are artworks by the many locally and regionally based artists the gallery proudly represents.

Paintings by Jerome Tupa
Bold, powerful paintings express a fascinating look into the artist's spiritual world.

Douglas Flanders & Associates is pleased to present the bold, powerful paintings of Jerome Tupa. Large centralized iconic shape and line compositions in bold colors express a fascinating look into his spiritual world. The paintings in this exhibit were created from years spent near the Mediterranean Sea. Thus, the paintings express landscape forms of sun, sea and earth.

Tupa explains Exploiting artistic materials led me to spend years using a variety of paint to express spiritual and philosophical ideas. Like all the series I have created over the past decades, the work is always a relationship between the deep inner earthiness rising to a bright glow of color.

A native of North Dakota, Father Jerome Tupa is a modern day version of a Renaissance man. With a doctorate in French literature he was a professor of French at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He is currently Pastor of the Church of St. Joseph in St. Joseph, Minnesota. Jerome Tupa has exhibited internationally. Interesting, in 2003 Tupa was featured in a CBS Sunday Morning story titled Monk Has Passion For Painting.

Formerly a traditional leaning artist, Kevan F Willington moved toward a more indirect painting method to create works with a more cosmic-scaled depth. His work alternates between building up surface layers and sanding them down as well as applying many glazes to create a polished stone like quality. For him there is just as much usefulness in the process of destruction as creation in his work. Willington says, "It allows me to revitalize and transform my paintings into something I couldn't pre-conceive.”

On the surface Kevan Willington’s paintings are dynamic botanical, ornithological scenes set against vast empty light filled skies. He states, however, “On a deeper level my work is a manifestation of the Taoist law that extremes turn into their opposites.” Upon closer analysis what is close is simultaneously distant, and what is distant is really close. His paintings further manifest atmospheric and emotional power. Kevan F Willington maintains an active exhibition schedule. His paintings are collected nationally.

A salon-style exhibition featuring a wide range of pieces by many of our artists.

Opening night: Saturday, December 12, 2015 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Exhibition ran: December 12, 2015 through January 24, 2016

Douglas Flanders & Associates is pleased to exhibit Abstraction In Minneapolis, a group exhibition that celebrates the dynamic vibrancy of abstract painting in the Twin Cities currently.

Featured in the show are works by Minneapolis painters Samuel Bjorgum, Donna Bruni, George Farrah, Josh Meillier and James Wrayge.

Each artist uniquely manipulates color, shape and visual space as well as brushstrokes, surface, size, scale and even process. Samuel Bjorgum's nonobjective paintings utilize layers of bold color to shake a visceral emotional response from the viewer. With broad, richly layered planes of color Donna Bruni creates paintings with palpable atmospheric resonance. George Farrah often references landscape in rich, built-up paint layers with gestural, almost calligraphic over-markings. Josh Meillier employs overlapping, translucent layers of broad brushstrokes and shapes to create visual depth in his paintings. In an architectonic style James Wrayge builds subtle layers of paint away from the flat canvas surface and places tracery marks to push spatial depth.

Exhibition dates: November 7 — December 6, 2015

Exhibition:
September 26 – October 25

With a quilting tradition dating back to female slaves of a cotton plantation owned by a Joseph Gee, 20th century descendants continued to create for functional purposes, from bedcovers to wall insulators, unique quilts that have been discovered to rival and even surpass the remarkable genius of the world's museum-quality abstract painters. With scraps of fabric these amazing women have developed distinctive styles, noted not only for their geometric simplicity but also for many mind-blowing improvisations.

Hailed by The New York Times as "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced," the quilts of Gee's Bend, in 2002, began a national exhibition tour including The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Mobile Museum of Art, and The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Their value continues to hold with ongoing exhibitions across the United States.

Minneapolis-based Peter Zarnoti's color photographs involve staging female models in visually compelling settings, each unique in their narrative and evocative content. The results are hyper-saturated, theatrical and surrealistic with combined elements of art history and contemporary pop culture.

Zarnoti's Liberty Leading the People is a contemporized rendition of French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix's painting depicting the Rebellion of France in 1830. Zarnoti has supplanted the suggestively clothed 19th century heroine with one of brash nudity wearing a militaristic red beret.

In another lush Untitled photograph Zarnoti portrays a truly contemporary Minneapolis pop icon, artist Patti Paulson and her notorious Lipstick Car, a white Pontiac Grand Am embellished with kisses, compacts, lipstick tubes, beads, jewels, feathers and glitter, topped with a giant tube of lipstick! Patti poses as a clowning pin-up against the car's hood, all playfully complimented by a phantasmal painted background.

The rest of the exhibit promises other images with equal drama and sly commentary, from neo-Pre Raphaelite Twin Cities lakeside nudes to burlesque figures and parodies of fashion shoots.

Kristen Lowe exhibits a new series of large drawing/constructions based on research into the American Eagle's practice as architect of the largest nest on record and its nesting habit of accumulating a variety of materials that are recycled year after year.

In her eagle's nest works, Lowe creates a charcoal base to which she adds the physical volume of materials such as grasses from nature walks, thread, whole and shredded postage stamps, and in some cases, even shredded paper currency. This presents a viewer the opportunity for not only exploring formal intricacies but the potential for symbolic and editorial commentary.

Historically significant postage stamps used in the nest drawings also play the starring role in a small-scale assemblage series titled The Back Story. Playing on a journalistic term, these assemblages are all mounted on the backs of small commercially stretched art canvases. Postage stamps are layered with acetate sheets printed with text or historical images found in the public domain. Lowe examines the mythologizing of historical events, figures and ideological affinities.

Kristen Lowe's drawings have been exhibited nationally in solo shows. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Louvre Museum, Paris. She also holds a professorship at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.

Curvism interprets the world in a non-linear, natural style of expression, where there are no man-made straight lines, boxes, triangles, etc. It seeks the more abstracts of the world – wholeness and diversity, quality, senses and the sensual, intuitive and experiential, emotions and empathy, and caring and cooperation. There is only the female driven aspect of the curve and the ellipse, which has been put in shadows by the Western, line-oriented viewpoint of a male-dominated world.