Michael Eade
Landscapes & Animalia
October 12 to November 12, 2005
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15,  2 – 5 pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm
Contact Rachelle Rae House for further information or go to www.cherylpelavin.com

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce Michael Eade’s solo exhibition, “Landscapes & Animalia.” Eade works in traditional egg tempera, using raised metal leaf and brilliant color. His work draws on the cultural and visual art histories of both East and West. His paintings have hints of Christian religious painting, Asian art and Persian miniatures. Eade’s work is very personal and transmutes his inspirations into a private realm of his own creation. His technique intentionally represses the individual brush stroke or expressionist touch we know as current painting. Instead his creatures, figures, skewed perspective, brilliant palette and sensuous surface combine to present a singular contemporary vision.

About his work the artist says:

My art is composed of lush, fanciful landscapes abundant with flora, sometimes inhabited by spiritual beings and beasts and more recently myself.

My paintings are not fantasies. They are a re-composition of images taken from religious and non-religious art. I reference both Eastern and Western cultures spanning many art historical periods, as well as images of nature and the environments we live in. I encounter these images in my daily life, when I travel on holiday, in a book, in a museum, on a page of a magazine. They are transformed and reappear in a spiritual world I create—different yet vaguely familiar.

It interests me that even with familiar imagery each person brings his or her own personal interpretation. Even symbolic forms carry different meanings for each of us. Familiar imagery opens the door to an alternate type of experience of symbolic understanding and feelings. My compositions are meant to facilitate this form of reaction.

My materials are traditional and familiar yet like the images I choose, these too have been reprocessed through my personal interpretations. The composition and color palette of my paintings are procured strictly from my intuition.

My work invites viewers to embark on visual tours of an unknown yet familiar looking world aimed at becoming a part of their cultural and emotional consciousness.

Michael Eade’s work has been shown at Wave Hill, Deutsche Bank and the New York Botanical Society. In 2002 he received an Aljira fellowship. In addition to his painting career Eade is currently finding a great deal of support through public and corporate commissions; in 2004 he won the New York AT&T prize for a conceptual sculpture and in November he will paint and design the holiday windows for Hermès, NYC.  Eade lives and works in Manhattan.