Exhibition Dates: November 6 – December 24, 2010
Location: Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 6, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Hours: Monday – Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999. www.arthurrogergallery.com

The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present “Flowers,” an exhibition of recent mixed media paintings by Nicole Charbonnet rendered in acrylic and mixed media. The exhibition will be on view at the Arthur Roger Gallery at 432 Julia Street from November 6th – December 24th, 2010. The artist will be present at the opening reception hosted by the gallery on Saturday, November 6th from 6 to 8 pm.

Pitcher Plant After Caroline D., 2010

In all of her work, Charbonnet appropriates images from the visual cultural world in which we are all immersed, such as art, films, cartoons and photographs; therefore, her work is a statement about the illusion of originality. It illuminates the idea that all art is an authentic forgery, and the view that creativity is memory because everything that is created owes much to existing images and work previously made by others.

In this body of work, Charbonnet incorporates images of flowers appropriated from other artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Ellsworth Kelly. The flowers are painted on, and then subsequently cut out, covered over, sanded off or repainted. The artist constructs surfaces utilizing an additive and subtractive process, which involves the manipulation of layers of collage, paint, fabric and different acrylic mediums. Charbonnet states:

Just like our minds retain numerous layers of ideas, feelings and images in some form, however vague or distorted, the resulting surfaces of my paintings retain or reveal a palimpsest “memory” of preexisting stages; some images, shapes, colors, textures and gestures are obfuscated, while others remain visible, however shaped or shaded by subsequent or even previous events. Painting, thus, serves as a metaphor for the phenomenon of recollection, simulating the process of memory itself. The imagination, which is the substance of all thought, along with vision serve as both source and subject of my work.

Born in New Orleans, Nicole Charbonnet received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1988 and her M.F.A. from Boston University in 1991. She has received numerous honors and awards including grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Elizabeth Greenshields and Art Matters Foundations.

For additional information contact the gallery at 504.522.1999 or visit our web site www.arthurrogergallery.com.