Polina Bertou and Jess Perlitz: zero percent contained
November 9 - December 21, 2024Artist Reception, Saturday November 9 from 4:30 - 6:30 pm
Gallery artist Polina Bertou’s first focused presentation with studio e brings her recent paintings into conversation with the tragicomic work of Portland sculptor Jess Perlitz.
Polina Bertou:
Bertou is a painter born in Chelyabinsk, Russia. She moved to Washington in 2002 and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Washington in 2013, and then an MFA from Hunter College in 2021. Polina has exhibited her work in Germany, New Orleans, New York, Portland, and Seattle. Visually informed by a variety of cultural references encompassing the language of cartooning, painting history, and literature, these works play with a combination of familiar images, scale shifts, and visual and linguistic tropes. Sharp lines live next to loose, expressive brush strokes, chaotic drips, and liquid stains, making the works feel simultaneously like drawings and paintings, equally graphic and abstracted A cast of enigmatic characters in Bertou’s work, figures of humans and animals painted with urgency and speed, peer out of evocative limbos. Stylistically direct, the figures emote vulnerability, anxiety, longing, and other less nameable emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions. By often painting with bubblegum pinks and stinging neons, Bertou lures the viewer into confronting serious topics through a sense of play. She renders familiar images absurd, presenting an array of humanity that vacillates between hope and despair.
Jess Perlitz:
Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, Canada, she is a graduate of Bard College, received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Socrates Sculpture Park in NY, Cambridge Galleries in Canada, De Fabriek in The Netherlands, and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.