Two solo shows: Todd Hebert – Jennifer Nehrbass

Santa Monica until 15/8/2009 2525 Michigan Avenue Mark Moore Gallery Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce “City and Country,” an exhibition of nine new paintings by acclaimed artist Todd Hebert, and “Weep and Wonder,” a concurrent solo exhibition featuring eight new “cameo” paintings by Jennifer Nehrbass.  In his new series of works, Todd Hebert shifts his focus from the large-scale close-up to long perspectives on smaller canvases. This playing with expected scale produces intimate and captivating works that entrance the viewer with the deft precision of their small details. Hebert embraces the label of “photorealistic surrealism” that his past work has earned, yet produces something that is altogether subtler and quieter, these new ovals and extended landscapes depicting snowmen, steam trains and dilapidated signs all shrouded in darkness. Still his work retains the same anthropomorphic quality, these inanimate objects encompassing the universal loneliness of night, speaking of isolation, decay and desolation. The iconography Hebert employs suggesting inevitable impermanence, his canvases capturing a fleeting moment just before a firework, a holiday or a season passes and is forgotten.  These images are sharply psychological, none of them providing a safe or comfortable arena. They take the myths of femininity and turn them inside out. The imaginative construct in which her work exists goes beyond realism. The point of these carefully contrived painting is to demonstrate the forces and situations that define women. – Suzanne Sbarge (two solo)