by Sylvie Contiguglia for Arte-Walk Following a quiet summer, Arthur Roger Gallery is awakening with a bang. Its latest show Art in the Time of Empathy features seventy artists represented by more than one hundred works of art including paintings, sculptures, photographs and site specific installations. A playful series of shoe-mask from Maxx Sizeler leads to a spacious space lined…
By: D. Eric Bookhardt for Gambit Arthur Roger Gallery has assembled an unusual exhibition. Three of its artists — Leonard Galmon, Amer Kobaslija and Demond Melancon — are portraitists, and artist and ex-football player Brandon Surtain paints urban scenes that function as portraits of the city. All have local roots except Kobaslija, a native…
Amer Kobaslija captures Florida’s lush, strange atmosphere while examining the expressive potential of oil paint’s luminous, elastic, viscous goo. by Edward M. Gómez for Hyperallergic April 26, 2019 Real artists are always looking for something — either venturing out into the real world to bear witness to human behavior or to characterize places and events,…
THE ROMANTIC IMAGE of the solitary painter, alone in a garret studio, strenuously working at a paint-spattered easel in the dead of night, certainly persists in many imaginations. That painter is charged, obsessed with the work – drunk on wine or turpentine, weary from extended periods of insomnia, living in relative filth. Despite the perceived stink of such a scene, it is an engaging thought that captures the creative vision of the uninitiated into studio practice in painting. From paintings by Amer Kobaslija at Arthur Roger Gallery, it appears that the imagined situation is not much different from standard, fanciful mental wanderings.
For Kobaslija, the studio is a unique and personal world built of interchangeable stuff: floors, walls, shelves, canvases, paint, paper, chairs, tables, brushes, easels, and lighting fixtures repeat themselves across the series, their positions made mysterious by the absent bodies of the artists working (and sometimes living) inside. The invisible movements and patterned routines of the artists order the placement of these unique assemblages, turning each picture into a leftover document of the “work” of the work of art.
As someone who was born and brought up in Bosnia, educated in Germany and is now based in New York, why should artist Amer Kobaslija have reacted as passionately as he did on hearing about the earthquake and the tsunami that struck Japan’s Tohoku region on March 11, 2011?
In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, artists are creating works that document the event, give aid to the victims and express their own complex feelings.
The work of Bosnian-born painter Amer Kobaslija, who lives in Florida, slips smoothly into the long-flowing Bay Area art current of intimate figuration.
The Bosnian artist Amer Kobaslija approaches the venerable subject of the artist’s studio from unexpected angles.
Annie Dillard wrote that “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. You need a room with no view so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”