Internationally acclaimed Swiss artist, Christine Sefolosha, featured in February at JRB Art at the
Paintings and monoprints by internationally acclaimed Swiss artist, Christine Sefolosha will be exhibited during the month of February at JRB Art at The Elms, in her show entitled, “Meninas.” The exhibit will open on February 4, 2011 with a reception from 6:00 until 10:00 p.m. during the monthly Gallery Walk in Oklahoma City’s Paseo Arts District. The exhibit will run through February 26, 2011. A percentage of sales will benefit Allied Arts.
Sefolosha was born in Montreux, Switzerland, and lived 9 years in South Africa as a young adult. She currently lives and works in her studio in Montreux. She is the mother of Thabo Sefolosha, member of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team. Christine Sefolosha has created works that have been shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Cavin Morris Gallery in New York, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the John Michael Kohler Arts Centre in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the Judy Saslow Gallery in Chicago, Galerie Polad-Hardouin and the Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris. Her work can be found in many public and private collections, including the Jenisch Museum, Vevey and the Lagerhaus Museum, St. Gallen, Switzerland. She founded the studio Quai 1-L’Atelier in 2000 within Montreux’s train station waiting room.
For her upcoming exhibition, Sefolosha’s artwork centers on young maidens called “Meninas,” as a tribute to 15th century Spanish artist, Diego Velázquez, who painted “Las Meninas.” Menina is Portuguese for “young girl.” Although widely known for her paintings, Sefolosha is primarily a printmaker, and will have monoprints exhibited alongside her paintings in her upcoming show. Sefolosha expresses herself very freely when she works, crouching on the ground and stretching across large sheets of thick paper to apply somber pigments with her hands, using energetic, splashing gestures. She mixes her paints with dirt and tar, creating a synthesis of sophistication and crudity that is reminiscent of the artwork of the Paleolithic cave painters of Lascaux or Altamira. In her book, “Phantoms,” about Christine Sefolosha’s art, Leslie Umberger, Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, describes how Sefolosha’s work “Evokes myth, metaphor, and ancient stories, casting her as griot of her own timeless tribe. A sense of distant, lost time saturates the images,” says Umberger, “yet any tangible reference to such is utterly absent and unnamed. In her symbolic language, shapes become luminous apparitions, whispering something personal and private.”
JRB Art at The Elms presents a diverse roster of emerging, established, and internationally exhibited artists who create in a wide range of media including: paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, glass, fine crafts, functional objects, fiber art and photographs. This 8,000 square foot award-winning gallery in Oklahoma City’s Paseo Arts District changes its exhibits monthly in a gracious environment that fosters a dialogue between the arts and the larger community while providing quality art for first time buyers as well as individual, corporate and museum collections.
JRB Art at The Elms, the former home of Nan Sheets which was built in 1920, is located at 2810 North Walker and is open Monday through Saturday, 10-6, and Sunday 1-5.
Phone: (405) 528-6336
Website: www.jrbartgallery.com
Email: info@jrbartgallery.com
