Deedra Ludwig

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For More Information Contact

Jules Bekker 404.869.0511

jules@tewgalleries.com

Kimo Minton & Deedra Ludwig:  

Opens May 3, 2012:  Through May 30, 2013

The month of May highlights two established artists who began their careers in Atlanta.

Kimo Minton, known as a sculptor in his early career, mounts a new exhibition of his polychrome woodcut panels. These works form a powerful ethnographic commentary that draws intuitively on woodcut techniques that have been in use for centuries. What sets this artist apart from others is both the unusual technique and the highly personal visual narrative that Minton has developed through years of studying world cultures and their art forms. Minton scores, gouges, cuts and sands to create sensual painted surfaces overlying the ‘bones’ of the carving beneath. These works, while abstract in nature, are deeply rooted in the human condition. The lyrical use of line and shape juxtaposed with strong areas of color bisected with delicate cut marks creates works that are as interesting close up as they are viewed from afar.

Deedra Ludwig is an interesting painter whose life has mirrored her art, and vice versa. A one-time organic farmer, a committed environmentalist and a person with a deep love of nature; and botany in particular; Ludwig manages to weave these interests through her work. Her paintings exude an almost spiritual light. Fragmentary plant forms float within the color fields; at times receding into pool-like depths as if being gently sucked down, in other instances, buoyed by luminescence, they seem to rise out of the color and project beyond the surface itself. This is partly visual effect, but, as Ludwig incorporates actual plant forms into the body of the work by embedding them into thin layers of encaustic the integration of the physical with the ephemeral becomes seamless.  In this way her work becomes on some level akin to a natural history tableau; specimens are placed within a conscious display; entombed and preserved along with their subtle narrative and the surrounding poetry.