Fend Off

Slag Gallery is pleased to present Fend Off, an exhibition featuring a new body of paintings by Dumitru Gorzo. As critic Paul D'Agostino has written in a recent essay about Gorzo's work:
"Whether painting, sculpting or drawing, Gorzo is wont to leave readily palpable traces of his procedural strata at the surface, and to allow his often extemporaneous approach to initial mark-making to guide his compositions into most unforeseeable spheres comprising abstracted figures and curious creatures, or what might even register as organically inflected, technologically implausible architectures and machinery. In the artist's most recent works, his trademark summer-vine greens, turquoise blues and subtly blanched, softened pinks come into atmospheric, airy confluence in his backdrops, in which all manner of smallish, darkly inscribed subjects seem to dart about in sparely described, middle-grounded hinterlands. In many of his foregrounds, then, these same colors are deployed as either expressive drips or chromatic bursts seeping through or filling in interstitial voids in much more robustly marked, candidly delineated, physically bizarre yet somehow sympathetic figures and forms. With these new works, Gorzo's painterly agency is that of a cave dweller with a preternatural awareness of Philip Guston and Hieronymus Bosch." 
You can read D'Agostino's full essay, "Energies & Echoes," here on After Vasari:

https://aftervasari.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/energies-echoes/

Dumitru Gorzo received a BA in Painting and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Advanced Studies in Painting from the University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania. He has had solo shows in museums such as MNAC (Bucharest), NJ MoCA (New Jersey), and Brukental Art Museum (Sibiu), as well as in art galleries and not-for-profit art institutions across the US and Europe. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at prestigious art venues such as the Istanbul Biennial, Marina Abramovic Institute (San Francisco), Kunsthalle Budapest (Mucsarnok), MODEM Modern and Contemporary Art Center (Debrecen), and Museum Küppersmühle (Duisburg), and Boulder MoCA, to name just a few. He is also a co-founder of the artist group and movement Rostopasca, the most influential art collective in Romania for the last few decades.