Bruno Marina Gallery is delighted to present The Apollonian Style: Selections from the VCU Graduate Program. This exhibition presents the work of both current and former participants in the graduate program of painting and printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. The department is becoming known as one of the most important graduate programs in fine arts in the U.S.A.

Joe Fyfe, who curated the exhibition, sensed “a new strain of poetics” at work in the VCU program. The artists in this exhibition, who playfully traverse the disciplines of installation, sculpture, architecture and painting, reminded him of what Susan Sontag dubbed an “Apollonian style.” By Apollonian she claimed , “beauty equals power, decorum, unaffected intensity. What is ugly is timidity, anxiety, demagoguery, heaviness.” For Fyfe, this tendency seemed to describe the collective sensibility of the artists in the exhibition.

Ron Johnson, a former graduate student who studied under Christian Bonnefoi, of the original Support/Surface group, elegantly interrogates the structural aspects of the painting ground. Emily Hall, originally trained as an architect, conflates codes of enclosure into aspects of sculpture and the garment, where pattern encases layers within a small monochrome relief. James Busby, another former graduate, makes highly polished white forms that sometimes hang like pictures on the wall but are resolutely sculptural. Kate Woodliff, a graduate, makes site-specific installations from paper. Text from a book springs to life and spreads across the walls.
Danielle Riede, a who is now participating in a program at the Düsseldorf academy, makes installations from found paint that comes from specific locations. Timothy Michael Martin, a graduate student, makes both paintings and improvised installations that are extrapolated from a study of plumbing systems.

The gallery especially wishes to thank Richard Roth, Chair of the Painting and Printmaking Department at VCU, and Ron Johnson of VCU, for their assistance with the exhibition, and Joe Fyfe, who curated the exhibition.

Bruno Marina Gallery is open from Thursday through Sunday, 12 to 6 pm. The gallery is located on Atlantic Avenue between Hoyt and Bond, reachable by subway (A, C, G to Hoyt-Schermerhorn or F to Bergen Street). Please contact the gallery for more information at (718) 254-0808. www.brunomarinagallerycom.