Painting & Public Art
Painting & Public Art
Exhibition
Sat, Apr 27 – Tues, Apr 30
Campbell Corner Gallery & Salon Walls
This exhibit highlights paintings and mixed media projects—some collaborative and participatory—by students in the class Painting & Public Art, Architecture 5780, taught by Professor Sanda Iliescu. In creating these works, students stressed the process rather than the artistic product and, like artist Sol Le Witt, defined painting as “an activity on a flat plane.” Their focus was on abstraction: they sought to explore and evoke the nature of objects, materials, and places rather than imitate their surface appearances. Students used traditional methods (paint wash on paper, acrylics on paper and canvas) as well as more unusual tools and materials (earth, trash, recycled materials). Throughout the course, students analyzed their creative process and tested potential relationships between aesthetics and ethics in art—between “good forms” and forms that in some way contribute or allude to the “common good.”
Instructor
Sanda Iliescu’s practice spans the media of painting, drawing, and collage. Outside the studio, she makes murals and installations, some with students at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of Architecture. Molly Krom Gallery based in New York and Berlin, and Les Yeux du Monde Gallery in Charlottesville represent Iliescu’s work.