Purchasing

April 2010 Exhibitions

First Thursday opening reception: April 1, 6-8pm.
Through May 1

Erik Desmazières

Onze Estampes: Haute Galerie Circulaire.
Etching and aquatint, 1998.
Edition of 60. F.F. 162. 14 x 10 inches.

Erik Desmazières (French, b. 1948), one of France’s best known contemporary printmakers, shares an affinity to neoclassical aesthetics in both the plurality of imagery and the metaphoric use of subjects to convey his artistic idiom. Imaginative depictions of people and places act like ancient ruins in conjuring up ruminative memories of another era and feed the exoticisim and fascination we find in cultures other than our own. Similar to the antiquarianism of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Desmazieres expresses his veneration in classical magnificence through his detailed rendering of architecture, objects, fragments, ornaments, costume and inscriptions. The subtle shading and incredible detail in each image reveals the artist’s mastery of the etching and aquatint processes. Erik Desmazieres’ work is exhibited internationally and also included in the permanent collection of the metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Visit Desmazières’ available works page

Philippe Mohlitz

Soulèvement Soudain Et Puissant Des Eaux De Mer.
Engraving, 1971. 8 x 6-1/2 inches.

Philippe Mohlitz’s (French, b. 1941) provocative themes and powerful imagery, rendered by masterful draftsmanship and engraving technique include the fantastic, the archaic, and the macabre. Mohlitz, using extremely fine, fluid engraving lines creates worlds filled with obscure details. Artistic influences include Odilon Redon and Rodolphe Bresdin. Mohlitz’s work can be found in private and public collections in Europe, the U.S. and Japan, including the Biblioteque Nationale de France in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Public Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Selections from the Estate of Wallace Engstrom (1924-2009)

Davidson Galleries is proud to exhibit a portion of the more than 800 works of art collected by Wallace Engstrom (1924-2009). Beginning in the late 1980s, Mr. Engstrom made regular visits to a number of Seattle art galleries in the company of the private art dealer Louie Congdon. The collection Mr. Engstrom built was extremely eclectic and ranged from old master woodcuts and engravings, to antique maps and views, regionalist prints (Northwest and national), paintings and drawings from the 1930s and 1940s, and contemporary regional painters such as Marion Peck and Susan Bennerstrom.

Crispin van de Passe II (Dutch, active in Paris, c. 1597-1670)

Crispin van de Passe II was one of the four children of Dutch patriarch publisher Crispin van de Passe (c. 1564-1637) who worked in the family business. Like his father and siblings, de Passe II specialized in portraits, book illustrations and other commissioned graphic works.  In 1623, while he was working in Paris, de Passe II completed a series of illustrations for Antoine de Pluvinel’s Maneige Royal (later titled Instruction du Roi à l’exercise, a handbook on horsemanship for the king.)  These large illustrations are notable for their unusual combination of print processes: the images consist of engraved plates within an architecturally-inspired woodcut border. In A History of Engraving and Etching, historian Arthur M. Hind calls de Passe II’s illustrations for Maneige Royal “perhaps the best achievement of any member of the family.” (p. 123-124.)

Visit our new Crispin van de Passe II page for available works.

Etchings after Mark Catesby & George Edwards

Birds of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
In 1749, German publisher Johann Michael Seligmann began to issue a nine-volume compilation of the work of renowned British naturalists Mark Catesby (1683-1749) and George Edwards (1694-1773), using plates that he produced himself specifically for the volume.  Over the next thirty years, the gradual release of these eagerly anticipated volumes brought vivid, charming images of New World birds to continental European audiences and made Seligmann a venerated name in natural history circles.

We’ve just added 34 works from Seligmann’s Sammlung Verschiedener Auslandischer und Seltener Vogel (Collection of Various Foreign and Rare Birds), published  in Nuremburg, 1749-1776. Each plate is engraved with the title in German, Latin and French.

Visit our Catesby/Edwards page to view all 60 in our collection!

Contemporary printmakers Barbara Noah and Kathleen Rabel each have work this month in Cornish College of the Arts’ annual Faculty Exhibition, opening Wednesday March 10, 5–8pm. Through April 14.

Visit Cornish.edu for more information

March 2010 Exhibitions

First Thursday opening reception: March 4, 6-8pm.
Through March 27

Davidson Galleries is pleased to present the work of four painters: Marlene Bauer (Oregon), Selene Santucci (Washington), Jessie Morgan (Massachusetts) and Dory Goode (Oregon). The works vary from pure gestural abstraction to a vocabulary of personal symbols inhabiting an implied space, inside or out.

Santucci. Core Strength, 2010. Oil on canvas. 36 x 36 inches.

Selene Santucci’s work is completely intuitive and results in a range of images reflecting varying degrees of abstraction. “In this latest body of work I started with abstracting figurative images, trying to stretch or push them further to the abstract each time….I want a strong formal composition which is emotionally available and where the image comes through the paint”

Bauer. Puff, 2010. Acrylic on paper. 36 x 44 inches.

Marlene Bauer’s paintings are a balancing act between abstraction and representation, formal concerns and whimsy, color and Line. The artist’s acrylic paintings on canvas or paper are filled with objects, often familiar objects, purposefully arranged in either a sparse or concentrated arrangement suggesting meaningful relationships one object to another. Rich color and painterly brushwork define both ground and objects.

Morgan. Untitled no. 926., 2009. Acrylic on aluminum. 24 x 24 inches.

This exhibition introduces the work of Jessie Morgan. Her surfaces are rich and fluid, layered with broad strokes to suggest simultaneously both a macroscopic and microscopic view. “The layers emerge from an organic depth and reference nature on, above and below the surface” The results encourage close observation or inspire contemplation.

Goode. Homage #71, 2008. Egg tempera and ink on panel. 12 x 12 inches.

The small egg tempera and ink paintings on panel by Dory Goode show few traces of the artist’s figural background. They reflect intuitive, lyrical mark making, consistent in conception and fluid in execution.

Contemporary printmaker Michael Krueger includes three of his recent drawings in Baer Ridgway Exhibitions current group show, Paper! Awesome!, a group exhibition of over 300 8.5 x 11 inch brand new works on paper by over 100 artists. The show opens Saturday, February 20, 4-7pm and continues through March 27.

View available works by Michael Krueger