Making Sense in Contemporary Painting

Deborah Grant, Crowning The Lion and The Lamb, 2013, oil, acrylic, enamel and paper on birch panel, 72” x 192” x 4.” Courtesy of the artist and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Will Lytch/Graphicstudio.

Tampa. Beginning Sept. 27, the USF Contemporary Art Museum will be exhibiting “Making Sense,” which gathers works by international artists Rochelle Feinstein, Deborah Grant, Iva Gueorguieva and Dona Nelson, all of whom have made distinctive contributions to contemporary painting. The show is curated by Margaret Miller, director of the USF Institute for Research in Art, and Megan Voeller, curator of education at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.

Using a range of approaches, these four artists explore painting as a medium, a set of techniques, an historical institution and a framework for making sense. Feinstein is inspired by WWII-era Enigma decoding machines. She takes on puzzling figures of speech, inscrutable ideas and encrypted social codes as challenges for painterly representation. Using a method she calls “Random Select,” Grant creates imagined, non-linear narrative encounters between historical artists, interwoven with her own varied humanistic interests, from literature to religion. Gueorguieva adapts the visual language of modern abstraction to create tumultuous, energetic spaces on canvas; her process of building up paintings by layering torn cloth with pigment and color washes produces spontaneous, dynamic compositions rooted in personal stories. For her part, Nelson’s two-sided paintings, stained and layered with strands of cheesecloth, invite viewers to encounter them as freestanding forms. “Making Sense” includes new works produced by Feinstein and Gueorguieva at Graphicstudio, the 45-year-old collaborative printmaking and sculpture atelier of the USF Institute for Research in Art. The exhibit runs through Dec. 12, 2014.