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Bio
Werfel’s recent paintings maintain a dynamic balance between figuration and abstraction. DeWitt Cheng in his catalog essay for Persistence of Vision calls her paintings,
“landscapes of metamorphosis that reveal themselves to the long gaze rather than the quick scan.”
About Werfel’s 2012 show at Jane Deering Gallery in Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Independent’ critic , Charles Donelan wrote,
“The idiom she has chosen is about as close to timeless as painting gets, and the command she exercises over color, composition, and negative space ravishes the eye. These images reward sustained viewing in a way that’s nearly cinematic.”
“landscapes of metamorphosis that reveal themselves to the long gaze rather than the quick scan.”
About Werfel’s 2012 show at Jane Deering Gallery in Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Independent’ critic , Charles Donelan wrote,
“The idiom she has chosen is about as close to timeless as painting gets, and the command she exercises over color, composition, and negative space ravishes the eye. These images reward sustained viewing in a way that’s nearly cinematic.”
Statement
While many artists have turned to representation to embody life in 2024, I make use of disjunctive marks and colors to make painterly works that hover between represented experience and pure abstraction. If they respond to the cacophony of political/cultural currents around me, it’s by the interruption and juxtaposition of those gestural marks. Contemporary dance provides a rhythmic metaphor, and, like musical polyphony, my paintings involve multiple independent “voices”- glimpses from my studio environment layered with vestiges of gestures that suggest fragmented memories.
My recent multi-panel paintings convey movement, while breaks between the panels create rhythmic stops. As they generate virtual universes, these compositions engage the spatial complexities of my earlier works from landscape – echoing their juxtapositions of nature and architecture, or evoking underwater reflections, as fragments float in fluid, veiled spaces.
-Gina Werfel
Reviews and Publications
- Review of Gina Werfel: In Context by Jonathan Goodman in Brooklyn Rail, ArtSeen, 09/2021
- Portland Press Herald 2/12/2017 reviewAbstract and landscape by a single brush at Elizabeth Moss Galleries. Gina Werfel’s ‘Geographies’ shows her enthusiasm for the act of painting.
Review by Daniel Kany - Interview with Gina Werfel on Painting Perceptions
- Huffington Post- November 2013
- Art Ltd- July 2012
- Catalogue California State University, Stanislaus “Persistence of Vision” (catalogue) 2011
- San Francisco Chronicle / SF Gate.com—Saturday, February 14, 2009
- Art in America—November 2007
- Sacramento Bee—May 2005
- Art in America—May 2004