Angels Gate Cultural Center

Benicia Gantner & Kim Schoenstadt features new work by the two California artists, who work directly on gallery walls, addressing issues of landscape and spatial relationships.  For this exhibition each artist will occupy one half of the Center’s main gallery, Gallery A, and each will be constructing a new site specific work for the exhibition.

Benica Gantner’s works are composed of cell cast acrylic and adhesive vinyl.  Using a computer driven cutter, she creates a palette of colors and shapes in vinyl from which she assembles her work.  For this exhibition she will be constructing a site-specific wall piece, as well as exhibiting a series of large panel pieces.  Gantner’s work explodes with color and form - landscapes that disobey natural laws and suggest new orders and potentials.

For this exhibition, all of Kim Schoenstadt’s work will be painted and drawn directly on the three walls of one half of Gallery A.  This single piece, a series of related wall drawings, consists of each referencing the same architectural and landscape elements, with solid fields of color filling different areas on each rendering.  This work confronts the issues related to architecture in its relation to landscape.

About the Artists

Benicia Gantner is a San Francisco-based artist, who has shown in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.  She received her MFA in Printmaking from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1998.

Kim Schoenstadt is a Los Angeles-based artist who has recently been exhibited in Berlin, Eindhoven and San Jose. An installation of hers is currently on display the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well. She received her BFA from Pitzer College in 1995.

More information about the artists and their work, including images, can be found at their websites:

www.beniciagantner.com

www.kimschoenstadt.com

Curatorial Statement

I have been following Kim Schoenstadt’s work for a number of years, and only in the past year was I introduced to Benicia Gantner’s work. The Center had been looking for an opportunity to exhibit Shoenstadt’s work, upon encountering Gantner’s work, a connection was immediate, fortuitous and necessary.  Both artists challenge traditional notions of  painting and drawing, by working directly on gallery walls, their work rejects the longevity of objects and through their use of non-traditional materials and techniques, they open themselves up to new potentials of form, color and space.

This exhibition is intended to be a conversation between the work of two artists that have their ancestral roots in more traditional two-dimensional wall works, but who are experimenting with new forms and interpretations.

-         Marshall Astor, Visual Arts Director, Angels Gate Cultural Center