Contemporary Artist John Baker Launches His Latest Works at New York's Lumen Gallery

ROCHESTER, NY, April 25, 2012 (Press-News.org) Contemporary artist John Baker exhibits his latest work this month at New York's Lumen Gallery. Baker is known for his collage paintings, which combine the color, creativity and texture of past works with contemporary elements. The exhibition, entitled "Recent Experiments and Large Collage Paintings", will open April 25 at Lumen Gallery, 221 East 60th Street, New York.

Baker's collage paintings are like visual choruses in which there is a richness of texture, gesture, color and emotional meaning that no one voice could achieve. In another sense, his collage paintings are like quilts, with their patient, labor-intensive piecing together of treasured components to create a unified spiritual effect. Depicting figures dancing, singing or making music, Baker's works are often humorous or romantic and often outrageous.

The large collage paintings, complex and various in their elements yet fully resolved, are being exhibited together with experimental paintings of faces that are not portraits but rather psychological explorations of personality dynamics. Baker was inspired by the "tronies" of 17th Century Dutch artists, which were face paintings that the public recognized as portrayals of types. Baker's contemporary "tronies" employ collaged fragments that are sufficiently discordant to suggest tenuously integrated fragments of personality, incoherence of mood or otherwise precariously organized aspects of the inner and outer self.

Baker was born and raised in Manhattan where he attended Donald Judd's woodworking classes for two years at the Allen-Stevenson school. Baker has exhibited widely in New York, Boston and Chicago, where reviewers have consistently praised his art. Robert Taylor in the Boston Globe wrote that "Baker's paintings demonstrate that the human figure as a source of fresh ideas still endures." On the occasion of an exhibition of Baker's work at the Marisa del Re Gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan the reviewer James Testa said that Baker's art was "colorful and witty, and full of energy and a clever use of materials." Writing in Artspeak Palmer Poroner said that Baker's art possessed that essential strength of all collage, "a sense of with."

The exhibition will continue through May 16. Lumen Gallery is an elegant, street level gallery at the southern end of the upper east side whose mission focuses on the display and promotion of art created by contemporary American and European artists. For more information please contact http://www.lumengallerynyc.com or call 212-784-6494.