TOPOPHILIA
Group Exhibition
Nick Flatt
Judit Navratil
Gala Sadurni
September 21 – October 5, 2019
Opening Reception
Saturday September 21, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 pm
SWIM Gallery: 509 Ellis St.
Gallery Hours
Friday and Saturday
12:00 – 5:00 pm
and by appt. (please call 415.340.2690)
In August of 2019, Auguste Somers and Yarrow Slaps of SWIM Gallery decided to have an œArt Show Contest for artists that are based in the Bay Area. The winner of this contest would receive a solo show at SWIM Gallery. After carefully looking over all of the submissions from the many unique and talented artists that entered the contest online, Yarrow and Auguste decided to declare photographer Sasha Kelley as the winner. Sasha™s show is scheduled for a currently undetermined date within the next year. However, due to the immense amount of impressive submissions, Auguste and Yarrow determined that the runners-up of the contest should be given the opportunity to show at SWIM Gallery as well. These artists are: abstract painter Nick Flatt, figurative portrait painter Gala Sadurni, and digital installation artist Judit Navratil. Through a discussion among the artists, they discovered due to each of their meaningful ties to the Bay Area that their artwork all shares the common theme of œTopophilia, which is defined as being œa strong sense of place, that often becomes mixed with the sense of cultural identity among certain people and a love of certain aspects of such a place. Thus, their show has been titled œTopophilia and will occur on September 21st from 6 to 9 pm.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Nick Flatt gained attention for his large-scale photorealistic portraits. After moving to Germany, Flatt gained international attention for highly detailed, political street murals. Influenced by the underground scene of urban abstraction in Berlin, and partnering with German graffiti writer Paul Punk, Flatt began honing a broad range of abstract techniques and showing with artists in the œPost Vandalism movement.
Judit Navratil™s practice is multivalent, engaging performance, social practices, drawing, as well as video and VR. The relationship between the real and virtual is personally significant to Judit, as she has moved between several different countries and cultures in her lifetime, and relies on digital means to connect to people and places in an attempt to construct œhome. Her projects are as much affective mappings of what it means to continuously oscillate between analog and digital, past and present. Navratil uses her body-device to keep balance through her compass-meditation: the Long Distance Somersault career. Rolling as far as she can helps her seeking higher alternatives and to gaze in the Eye of the Hurricane.
Navratil earned an MFA in Painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2008 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2019. She has been exhibiting in Hungary, Canada, France, Korea and the Bay Area. Her work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Cadogan Art Award, a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship and a Presidential Scholarship for Anderson Ranch.
She is currently an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Gala Sadurni is a San Francisco-based artist. She was born in San Francisco, and raised in the Bay Area and Guanajuato, Mexico. Inspired by the changing environment around her, Gala began developing her art practice. After returning to the US for college, she graduated in 2009 from UC Santa Barbara™s Honors Program with a BA in Art and an emphasis in Photography. She is self-taught in painting. Her current focus is portraits of people, painted in oil. She owes her current inspiration to the one and only vibrant downtown SF, where she currently resides.
œWith these portraits I aim at creating a diverse, culturally-charged picture of the city, tailored by my personal experiences and encounters living in downtown SF. Part of what I do involves exploring cities asking strangers for their photo, which gets me out of my studio and focused on the great unknown. I place people in an intimate, personalized setting, surrounded by details of the city that are normally overlooked. While the subjects are painted individually, the series is meant to work as a harmonic group of paintings, reinforcing the idea that everyone adds a little bit of character to this city we call home. My painting process involves experimenting with composition and loose shapes, to integrate each background with their respective subject. I like painting loosely, aiming for quirky and wild use of color throughout the series and sometimes pairing it with spontaneous dots and bendy lines. I work fast and without drafts, but that keeps painting unpredictable and exciting.
– Gala Sadurni
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