FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tony Wight / Bodybuilder & Sportsman is pleased to present its first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Portia Hein. Portia Hein’s paintings and watercolors address the poetics that frame humans’ relationship with nature. Drawing from such diverse sources as the writings of Scottish naturalist John Muir and the works of Chinese “master of the lotus” painter Zhu Da, Portia Hein appropriates a language so as to explore experiences of rapture and ideas of the sublime. In Portia Hein’s paintings, moon and sun rays fall on stands of overlapping trees inhabited by snakes, owls and other creatures. Portia Hein draws upon associations that are common to both nature and to painting—being, looking, forming, and experiencing. Her paintings actively engage the way in which we have iconized our experience of nature in order to not just explain what it is, but also to investigate where we situate ourselves in relation to the natural. In this exhibition, Portia Hein exploits a vocabulary of painterly mark-making most commonly associated with the German expressionists. The impastoed surfaces of Hein’s works are composed of layers of scraped and palette-knifed paint in straightforward colors such as black, white, yellow and red. These paintings articulate a flattened space that emphasizes the singularity of the moment and an immediacy of experience. Portia Hein has exhibited in the United States, Europe and China. Recent exhibitions include Fata Morgana at Galerie Schmidt Maczollek (Cologne); Rogue Wave 07 at LA Louver (Los Angeles); and [keep feeling] Fascination at the Luckman Museum, California State University, Los Angeles. Hein received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. |