Dana Bell
September 10 – November 5, 2009
Opening Reception: September 10 from 7:00 pm
Dvorak Sec Contemporary is proud to present Still(s); the debut solo exhibition of New York artist Dana Bell in Europe.
Dana Bell’s paintings illuminate great moments of 20th century cinema, selected with an eye towards classical sensibility, framed with geometric symmetry. From Fellini spectacles to little-known Noir gems, Bell spotlights films that have both strong aesthetic languages and nuanced psychological trends guiding the narrative. Seizing upon this psychology and using it as an apparatus of refining, Bell transforms these distinct, disparate achievements of cinematography. She distills film stills into a shared, formalistic, intentionally limited visual language in which the guiding psychology is both instrument and corpus. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source of its head, Bell’s reductive process reveals the fundamental core of the films cognitive and emotional text.
In Bell’s paintings the color is amped up to full volume, and the figures become part of a decorative pattern, inside which figures seem to move through space as the colors shift and shapes bounce off of each other. She paints images that are as important in the negative space as the positive. Bell says about her paintings "While trying my best to merge into situations throughout my life, I find that not only metaphorically, but physically altering oneself into a background can be a protecting and life-saving maneuver. We are chameleons, fitting into situations as much as they fit into us." Her paintings are puzzle like in theory and appearance, yet are reflective of ourselves in the present.Dana Bell was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1974. After completing the Fine Arts Program at WayneStateUniversity she went on to obtain a Masters in Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art. She has participated in a number of notable exhibitions such as Metamorphic Gestures at the ChelseaArt Museum in 2008 and Forever Home at the haNnAGallery in Tokyo. Recently, her work was exhibited in New York City’s prestigious Flag Art Foundation in the exhibition Re-Accession: For Sale by Owner. Dana Bell lives and works in New York City.
Dana Bell’s exhibition is the first in a series of exhibitions on display at Dvorak Sec Contemporary that will feature a selection of young, emerging artists primarily based in New York City. The artists are representative of an exciting new generation of painters and sculptors based in NYC, and the planned exhibitions will provide Prague with a survey of the New York City art scene. The program for 2009/2010 keeps with the gallery’s mission to bring the most current contemporary art to Prague and to draw attention to the talent and potential of young & emerging international artists.
For images or more information please contact Jessica Martinaitis at info@dvoraksec.com or at +420 777 716 381. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10am -6pm, and Saturday 11am-6pm.