WOODS, LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP Opens at DC Moore Gallery Tomorrow

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to announce its summer group exhibition, Woods, Lovely, Dark and Deep, curated by John Zinsser, on view from June 20 - August 15 with an opening reception on June 20 from 6 - 8 pm. This show juxtaposes historical and contemporary painters and photographers as a way of re-thinking "landscape" and its associated meanings. Zinsser began with an intuitive notion, looking at artists for whom this representational genre allows a revealing of hidden places or psychological foreboding. For many, illusion is played against literal reality, whether in terms of paint physicality or received photographic treatment of subject matter.

The tensions between nature as observed and its metaphorical role are heightened as we move forward in a modernist trajectory, starting with examples from Charles Burchfield, Romare Bearden and Fairfield Porter. Milton Avery, April Gornik and Jake Berthot all developed their work alongside the ascendency of formalist abstraction, and fully respond to the objectivity of that language. Photographers Duane Michals, David Hilliard and Noriko Furunishi take the historical tradition of plein air painting and invert its meanings, summoning fictive narrative fantasies through factual encounters. A younger crop of painters-including Max Jansons, Liz Markus, Daniel Heidkamp, Claire Sherman and Sissel Kardel-return landscape to the realm of the sublime and fantastic, with a range of inventive and unorthodox strategies.