Exhibiting artists who hail from around the globe, Gilman Contemporary has become a place of discovery on conversation. This fall, Gilman presents two artists who explore botanicals in two very different ways, photographer Paulette Tavormina and painter Frances McCormack.
Paulette Tavormina lives and works in New York City and Connecticut. Amidst the bustle that defines the city and the tranquility of the country orchards, she can often be found searching for the perfectly imperfect flora that characterize her photographs. Her arrangements often recall the sumptuous detail of seventeenth-century Old Master still-life painters and serve as intensely personal interpretations of timeless, universal stories. With a painterly perspective reminiscent of Francisco de Zurbarán, Adriaen Coorte, Juan Sánchez Cotán, and Giovanna Garzoni, Tavormina creates worldly still lifes.
Frances McCormack’s collage botanical studies, as well as her oil paintings. Her paintings explore invented spaces that represent the process of growth and transformation. The inspiration for these places has come from the walled gardens in Rome at the Villa D’Este and Villa Lante, at the Alhambra in Spain, or the Topkai Palace in Istanbul.
“These places provide a container where the urgency and noise of everyday obligations fall away, and the visitor has access to other dimensions of though and feeling,” says Frances McCormack.
Captions:
Blue Hydrangeas, Yellow Canaries & Love Letter
By Paulette Tavormina
Archival pigment print
River Road
By Frances McCormack
Oil on canvas over panel
80” x 74”
661 Sun Valley Road | Ketchum
208.726.7585
gilmancontemporary.com
