Rebecca Lea Rosenheck

Exhibition Dates: September 22 – December 18, 2015
Reception: Friday,  September 25, 2015 / 7 – 9PM

Studio Montclair presents the exhibit “Honoring the Fauves,” to run from September 23 through December 18, 2015, at Academy Square galleries, 33 Plymouth Street, Montclair, NJ. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 25, from 7 to 9pm.

The show features contemporary works in the vibrant, bold look evocative of the Fauves. The exhibit’s 48 works include various media, such as painting, photography, and collage, and share a use of color to depict landscape, still life, portrait, and interiors.

“Wild beasts”—Fauves—made a splash in the Post-Impressionist art world of Paris of the early twentieth century. With their structured planes of pure color, Fauvist painters such as Matisse, Vlaminck, Rouault, and Dufy broke with Impressionism as well as with older, traditional methods of perception. The French name ‘Fauves’ was intended as an insult by influential French critic Louis Vauxcelles when he first saw the artwork at the 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition in Paris. However, the name stuck and became associated with artists using bold color in an abstract manner.

The show’s curators, Virginia S. Block and Pam Cooper, state: “We were not looking for art that was an imitation of the original Fauvists’ works, but rather work that has been created with the same vibrancy of color used to delineate the artists’ subjects. This show is a nod to the past contemporaries of the early 1900’s.”

“Honoring the Fauves” features the artwork of the following 15 Studio Montclair members: Constance Culpepper, Joan Gantz, Donna Grande, Orna Greenberg, Dante Guariglia, Tina LeCoff, Lucretia McGuff-Silverman, Dennis McKee, Christine Parker, June Ponte, Rebecca Lea Rosenheck, William Sargent, Jane Sterrett, Lynne Toye, and Sol Zaretsky.