Frederico Seve Gallery - Mariana Vera: Gathering Parts - A series of Flora Montages

NEW YORK, NY, March 10, 2011 (Press-News.org) MARIANA VERA: GATHERING PARTS

A SERIES OF FLORA-MONTAGES

March 3 - April 23, 2011

Frederico Sève Gallery

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, March 10 from 6-8 pm

New York - Frederico Sève Gallery proudly presents a series of mesmerizing flora-montages from Colombian artist Mariana Vera in this exciting debut exhibition. Working with the ephemera of the natural world, such as leaves, pines and petals on paper or canvas, Mariana's work reconfigures natural artifacts into labyrinthine designs to create dynamic landscapes. This exhibit will open on March 3 and be on view through April 23, 2011.

Mariana Vera's montages oscillate between pattern and chaos, nature and artifice, decay and preservation. Mariana, who considers herself a "recycler of nature," works to "immortalize the perishable," and in so doing, she at once displays fragility and permanence, reconfiguring the most delicate of objects into veritable statues. Collecting only from the ground, she offers her material a chance at immortality in the aesthetic object. On her process she writes:

I gather that which nature allows to fall to give it a magical touch: by means of the creative imagination it is translated to paper and in turn I convert it into visual poetry. When I go around paths without a destination on my bicycle harvesting loose leaves and flowers, randomly scattered, I reorder the world that I perceive around me.

"Gathering Parts" explores this tension between free form and design, the natural object and the canvas on which it is placed.

In his text for the exhibition, leading scholar on art from Latin America and Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of New York University, Dr. Edward J. Sullivan observes that her "exuberant re-configurations of natural life come from an aesthetic entirely her own. Her art derives from a direct confrontation telluric forces and the efflorescence of cosmic energy." These other-worldly compositions afford viewers a place to meditate, a space for relief. Mariana's flora-montages preserve what has inspired her through a direct engagement with nature and embrace nature's ephemeral reincarnations.

Mariana Vera was born in 1959, in Barranquilla, Colombia. From 1983 to 1986 she studied art history at Sorbonne de Paris. An outsider artist, Mariana Vera is self-taught in her art making. She now lives in San Andres, Colombia, an island abundant with nature from which she draws her inspiration and materials to create her art and visual poetry.

Please join us at the opening reception on Thursday, March 10, from 6-8 p.m.
For further information, please contact Frederico Sève at Frederico@latincollector.com or 212-334-7813 or visit latincollector.com. The rest of our team is also available for information: Adriana, Alicia, and Michelle.
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Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday 10 am - 6 pm and Saturday 11 am - 6 pm.