“They are friendly and protective, and they are utterly strange – at once majestic and ominous. In this sense, they’re like hulking amulets carrying a kind of superstitiously derived, talismanic portentousness.” - Paul D’Agostino

Slag Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of "Scapes", featuring painting, sculpture, works on paper and installation by Tirtzah Bassel, Lucy Fradkin, Sandro Kopp, Tamara Kostianovsky, Yumiko Ono, Walter Price, Marius Ritiu, Naomi Safran-Hon, Mircea Suciu, Paul Vogeler, Paul Wesenberg, and Alida Wilkinson. Slag Gallery also presents a new outdoor sculpture by artist Dumitru Gorzo.

Slag Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Romanian-born, New York-based artist Dumitru Gorzo.  This exhibition marks the artist's sixth solo show with Slag Gallery.

Gorzo’s sculptural language combines modern and traditional in a lyrical way raising questions about the nature of forms: how volume relates to space, what makes an artwork tangible, and the honesty of aesthetics.

"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.

Both artists synthesize complex forms by a cultivated use of traces, gestures, color and treated irregular surfaces in order to address the layers that structure their own identities. The use of journals, maps and characters point to the constitutive and formative elements of their identities that might seem scattered, but that have been reorganized to open a process of recognition.

Slag Gallery is pleased to present RITES, an exhibition featuring the latest works of Brooklyn-based artists Tirtzah Bassel and Dumitru Gorzo.

Painting atop large prints of color, black and white or ambered photographs of people in either definitively urban or patently rural settings, Gorzo deploys bold colors and energetically sure, candid brushstrokes to create stratified picture planes in which figures portrayed photographically are partially obscured or reconfigured by abstractly painted interlopers, and in which mixed personal nostalgias—at times geographically immediate, at times temporally distant, at times allowing the personal to give way to the societal—feed into and off of one another’s images in uncompromisingly vivacious, profoundly revivified compositions.

Dumitru Gorzo's variably scaled mixed media paintings on paper are at once explorations into, extrapolations from and expressive, highly energetic extensions of the photographic images that engender them. Working mostly with black and white prints of his own creation, the artist goes on to either venerate or defy the pictorial content of the photos, which often become so deeply integral to and embedded within the greater compositions as to be almost obscured entirely.

With this new body of work, Dumitru Gorzo continues to delve into the angst of human condition through the painterly examination of the fellow-creature. Life size human bodies captured in the act of carrying something or somebody as sole resonating constant of the human existence, are inviting the viewer in the creation of the individual narrative. In fact, Gorzo’s reveries are full of these bodies, and through their making, he plays his part in the abysmal search for the sense of life.

With this new body of work, Gorzo has concocted a formula of clay and glue on paper and canvas as his focal medium. For him, the use of paper is extremely important—its’ properties possess a vulnerability, or permeability of sorts, that literally allows the surface to vibrate with feeling. Given the earthen qualities of these materials, it is no surprise that the artist often drew with mud as a child and found the Romanian landscape as an early inspiration, further pointing to his works’ direct connection to his homeland. The intensity of pigment attained through oil or watercolor coupled with the tactility of clay, coalesce in a way that could be seen as bringing sculpture to canvas or paper.

Slag Gallery will open on June 12th with the first New York exhibition of works by the Romanian artist Dumitru Gorzo. "In the Corner of My Eye" evokes images created by the mind at the periphery of the visual field, images and forms that appear free from the oppression of logic and convention.