March 31 – May 05, 2007

Opening reception: March 31, 6–8 pm

Artist Talk: 6:30 pm

Lora Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce Eastern European Painting Now, an exhibition presenting the work of four young artists from Eastern Europe, curated by critic and curator, Jane Neal.

The artists in this exhibition, Slawomir Elsner, Adrian Ghenie, Serban Savu and Wojciech Zasadni, have emerged from a generation that experienced the hold of communism, its subsequent disintegration and transition into a democratic society. Drawing from this distinct set of circumstances, the work by these artists is inspired by one of the most momentous periods of transition and development in European history.

Jane Neal writes in her essay accompanying the exhibition, "each of the four artists in this show is making work that demonstrates a removed, voyeuristic, cynical or even ironic take on the ideologies, political systems and expectations that constrain the individual and effect change in our world. In some cases this is conveyed with subtlety, as in Savu's poignant observations of the 'everyman' going about his business; or Elsner's homage to the popular Polish magazine 'Panorama', recreated in paint, complete with the original magazine?s blurred registration; or Ghenie's filmic black-and-white imagery peopled by the imagined rendezvous of actual or fictional characters. In Zasadni's case, however, his 'covers' appear barefaced and accusatory – a record intended to last. Ironically, they are derived from the most easily forgotten disposable material – the tabloid."

Since mid-2005 Jane Neal's focus has been on Central and Eastern Europe. Neal writes regularly for numerous international arts publications including Art Review, Modern Painters, Flash Art, Art in America, and the Saatchi On-line Magazine. She is also a professor of British Art Post 1980 at the Stanford House Program at Oxford University. In March of this year she delivered a lecture entitled Moving East: Why the art world is looking beyond its western capitals at the University of Southern California. Neal studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford University as an undergraduate and completed her thesis on "Postmodernism and Body Politics" for her MA at the Courtauld Institute, London.