Press Release - Sebastian Blanck:

DANIEL AZOULAY GALLERY is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of New York based painter Sebastian Blanck in his first Miami show. Sebastian Blanck is an American painter living and working in New York City. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976 and is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where he received a BFA in painting in 1998. At twenty-five years old he has already completed a visiting artist's program at the American Academy of Rome where he was one of the youngest painters ever accepted. Blanck's work stands out among a school of young New York based painters attracting the attention of collectors, galleries and museums worldwide. Though New York based, Blanck has regularly traveled to Miami with famed photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. His large and small-scale oil paintings, depictions of female and male figures showering layered by abstraction, reflect an aesthetic influenced by the mist, water, light and air. The beautifully executed, quiet of the showers and the bodies melt together in a bold expression of color much like our tropical Miami setting. Mathew Rich in his essay on Sebastian Blanck's work eloquently stated that "one of the major terms of this series would be the embrace of op-art surface effects to counteract the modernist impasse of material surface versus picture plane." Blanck's work also manages to call to mind the notion of American painting as restored through the work of Ross Bleckner, Philip Taaffe and Christopher Wool.

SEBASTIAN BLANCK's large and small-scale oil paintings first began by addressing the image of the female figure. The female nude depicted is Blanck's live-in partner and artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders. In the mundane, daily exercise of cleansing one's body, showering, bathing, Isca is transformed into the idealized image of the female figure. Her identity is blurred by Blanck's soft brushstroke, but through the implementation of semi-opaque, abstract circular shapes- her colors and the mood of the activity is heightened and sharp.