NICOLE FIACCO GALLERY

The Nicole Fiacco Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by four artists, each of whom arrive at abstraction through different means and purpose. 

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Robert Roane Beard will exhibit works from his ongoing Irish Landscape series.  The small, jewel-toned watercolor and ink works on paper are an investigation of meandering lines that toy with the abstract shapes that stand-in as alternate ways of seeing air, earth, water and other forms found in nature.  Mr Beard recently was awarded a residency at the world renowned artist colony, Cill Rialaig Project in County Kerry, Ireland.  Beard has also created installation works, including "Thinking of You," a meditation on friends lost to AIDS, which appeared in Milan, Turin, and New York to unanimous critical acclaim.  His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Chelsea Arts Club, London; the National Academy of Design, New York and he is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in Dublin, Ireland in 2010.   Robert Beard lives in New York and the Hudson Valley.

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Stephen Courbois is a painter, printmaker and fabricator working primarily in casein, paper and mixed media.  Having also worked as an architectural draftsman, designer and muralist, Courbois is an artist concerned with the process of art-making – the struggle and exhilaration that an artist experiences as they attempt to resolve an idea or media into a finished artwork.  Taking his cue from Modernism and a play on the Decorative Arts, Courbois has created a series of mixed media works based on 19th century wallpaper patterns that he reclaims, manipulates, deconstructs and then re-assembles.  Using similar techniques, Courbois has also taken cut-out shapes in whole or part and created mixed media compositions on paper that shift and antagonize to create segmented fields of color and form.  Stephen Courbois was born 1962 in Brooklyn, NY and was raised in New Canaan, Connecticut. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, where he majored in painting.  Courbois lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

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Jeanette Fintz will exhibit recent paintings inspired by a recent visit to the Andalusia region of Spain.  Fintz’s rhythmic, intensely colored works are informed by jazz and the music of Flamenco and East India, and importantly, the combination of these influences with the visual rhythms found in Ikat textiles and Islamic tile patterns.  Fintz teases form from form, creating the illusion of volume and continually challenging compositional balance  Fintz uses methods of painting that confront the tenets of Decorative arts movements and Abstract Expressionism.  Fintz has exhibited her work internationally, starting in New York in 1979.  In 2008, she received the Emil & Dines Carlsen Painting Award for her participation in the National Academy of Design 183rd Invitational of Contemporary Art.  Fintz has been awarded residencies and fellowships that have included The MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Ucross Foundation, Altos De Chavon and Ossabaw Island Project.  Fintz received her MFA from Boston University SFA (1975), and her BA from Queens College CUNY (1972). She attended the New York Studio School (1972-73) and received a scholarship to the Skowhegan School in 1975.  She teaches at Parsons The New School for Design in NYC.  Jeanette Fintz lives in the Hudson Valley.

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Enrique Kico Govantes will exhibit a new series of paintings titled Four Seasons.  In these works, Govantes’ heavily worked surfaces and enthusiastic lines are directed by an intense color palette and thus, mood, that relates to seasonal flux.  Govantes is influenced by Cuban Folk Art, Calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism. His frenetic mark-making results in explosive compositions that allude to figuration yet remain fundamentally abstract.  Kico Govantes was born in Havana, Cuba in 1957.  He studied Architecture & Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, RI. In 1979 he moved to San Francisco, CA where he began pursuing his career as an artist. His work was shown at several West Coast galleries during the 1980’s and 1990’s. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley.