Roots and Anchors: Painted stories of freedom, flight and grounding by Christine Sutton

New paintings by Bozeman artist Christine Sutton will be unveiled during the September artwalk. In her latest series, Roots & Anchors, Sutton explores a landscape of nostalgia, melancholy, loneliness and hope. These otherworldly paintings play with images of weight and lift to create abstract portraits of mood, time, and place to examining her own real-word experiences. Christine’s images are rough, yet deliberate, exposing the hidden tensions and meanings underlying daily existence. From a small cast of common elements including the prairie horizon-line, the “sage brush ocean”, and open sky, Christine conjures up an emotional and contemplative space that is continually evolving.

10% of the proceeds from this show will be donated to Pintler Pets, a no-kill animal shelter in Anaconda, MT.

Opening reception will be held in tart, rooms 107B & C in the Emerson Center, 111 S. Grand Ave. Visit www.tartique.com, call 406-582-0416 or email tartress@tartique.com. The show will be on display through October 6th, 2011.

Francesco Gillia paintings @ Exit Gallery

Embrace an exhibition of paintings by MSU graduate student Francesco Gillia at the Exit Gallery.

Art is much like writing, but an artist can speak volumes in only a few inches of paint and canvas. He can paint what is difficult to comprehend or even what is difficult to look at, if he feels. One might have a very conflicting experience standing in front of the colossal nudes by MSU graduate student Francesco Gillia. This artist’s work is stunningly beautiful but the women that he paints have been separated from their most defining features, their faces, arms and legs, and are distilled to a view that focuses directly on their most feminine parts. Not only that, but they are simply massive.

Francesco is Italian and anyone who talks to him for more than ten seconds will have figured that out. His paintings certainly resonate with the great classical Italian statues. One of his models, Tamara Christians, said that Gillia’s paintings “are massive displays of femininity, each one coyly revealing something about the model.” She goes on to talk about the “formula” that develops each work: “belly buttonlandmark, vaginas eye level, hung such that feet, if the giant headless women had them, would stand flat on the floor.” There is much mystery to the women but what they present to the viewer is a beautiful truth about the female body and all its imperfections.

The exhibition Embrace by Francesco Gillia will be in the ASMSU Exit Gallery September 6-16 with an opening reception on Wednesday, September 7th at 5:00 pm. The Exit Gallery is located in Strand Union Building room 212, Montana State University and hours are Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. For more info, please call 406.994.1828 or email exhibits@montana.edu.