CLARKE GALLERIES CELEBRATES AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART
Stunning Exhibition Features Immi Storrs Sculptures and Paul Richard Aho Paintings
Cold Comfort Farm, August 5th – October 1st

Stowe, VT --- The much anticipated summer exhibition presented annually by Clarke Galleries, Stowe, Vermont, features strikingly beautiful contemporary paintings by Paul Richard Aho and entrancing bronze sculptures by Immi Storrs. Though the mediums and messages are vastly different, the works play off one other to stunning effect. The exhibition opens August 5th in the gallery at Cold Comfort Farm and continues through October 1st.

Decidedly, this is a show of contrasts. Male, female. Painting, sculpture. Translucent color, dense patina. Ephemerality, solidity. Lust and desire, sense and order. The consequence of these opposites brings a vibrancy to the installation and to the works themselves. It also magnifies the extraordinary talent both artists bring to their mediums.

A painter and printmaker for 30 years, Mr. Aho’s abstract paintings, all oil and acrylics on wood, are breathtaking. His mastery of underpainting and overglazing imbues each work with a shimmering transparency, producing a depth that belies the two dimensional, as if looking through layers of gently undulating water. It is a shifting, fugitive experience, nothing short of mesmerizing.

Early on, Mr. Aho was intrigued with Gerhard Richter’s stylistic process, but clearly he has found his own voice, a personal, expressionistic style. The texture, color and rhythmic transmutation of abstract forms provide a tantalizing interplay of elements. In several pieces, including the dazzling Reflex and infatuating High Noon, long, oval images intersperse with permeating light, oblique references to one of his lifelong passions, surfing.

An art instructor and Florida resident, Mr. Aho says, “There’s definitely a watery effect and the sense of looking through one surface to another. My work reflects our collective, yet contradictory impulses – indulgence and denial, the spiritual and the concrete, the cognitive and the carnal. My intent is to create paintings that are undeniably poetic and unabashedly beautiful.”

The same can be said of New York City artist Immi Storrs’s remarkably expressive bronzes, mostly animals – goats, horses and sheep among them, with only a singular nod to the human figure. Her works, too, are studies of contrasts - the motionless motion of horses in Four Horses, Three Riders, the blur between fantasy and reality, abstract and representational. Often the results tiptoe the fine line of anthropomorphism.

Ms. Storrs readily admits that her work is not in any sense political and she leaves it to the viewer to interpret and assimilate. “It’s not for me to tell others what a work should or should not mean; that I prefer to leave to the viewer’s discretion. Nor do I belabor meaning for myself. I do revere animals and find the horse spectacuarly beautiful. A three dimensional person, I happen to love clay and the sensation of leaving my fingerprints on the work.”

Her particular fingerprints are unmistakeable in these evocative bronzes and mixed media sculptures, all highly original and visionary, but not without a hint of Henry Moore here, a whisper of Marino Marini there. Bull Box No. 2, reminiscent the constructs of Louise Nevelson, stands on its own without precedence. Always the familiar lingers on the edge of fantastical with unending mystery, beauty and unspeakable eloquence.

Both Mr. Aho, who received his MFA from the University of South Florida, and Ms. Storrs, largely self-taught with the exception of study with Sidney Simon, have exhibited widely and are well represented in private and museum collections nationwide. This is the first time Mr. Aho has shown in Vermont, while Ms. Storrs returns to familiar territory having once lived in nearby Warren. To view their work together in such a splendid setting is cause for celebration and an occasion to eagerly anticipate.