This exhibition brings together the work of two artists to create a broader dialogue on abstraction, line, and color as it coincides in contemporary painting and drawing. Pete Schulte’s monochromatic drawings of looping lines and graphite glowing shapes play against Yevgeniya Baras’ more ragged and built-up paintings, brightly colored and unframed as strands of burlap...
This exhibition brings together the work of two artists to create a broader dialogue on abstraction, line, and color as it coincides in contemporary painting and drawing. Pete Schulte’s monochromatic drawings of looping lines and graphite glowing shapes play against Yevgeniya Baras’ more ragged and built-up paintings, brightly colored and unframed as strands of burlap hang loose off the stretcher. Schulte focuses in, removing any trace of the hand and yet, growing tighter as the renderings seem almost preordained, as if they simply appeared. Baras loosens the grip on the show, veering wildly into dribs and drabs of paint, caked on and made solid; an applied palette knife mark, thick with paint and frozen in time.
Most of the works on display are relatively modest in scale, encouraging the viewer to volley back and forth, experiencing the comparison themselves. Additionally, both artists rely on foreground and background for their images to appear. For Schulte it is the creamy white of the paper, a substrate which allows the graphite to meld flat on the page. Baras seemingly digs out her designs from the textures of paint or builds it up using paper pulp, articulating layers of abstraction which, at times, suggest framing. Read together, the exhibition presents a myriad of ways of looking and making, both rough and refined, open and closed.
Exhibition organized by The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College
Yevgeniya Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar for 2022/2023. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021, Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, the Pollock-Krasner Grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018, and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, and Art in America. Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery on the Lower East Side of NY (2010-2018). She holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). Baras teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Rhode Island School of Design.
Pete Schulte is and artist based in Birmingham, Alabama, He has presented recent solo exhibitions and installations at Mckenzie Fine Art, New York, New York; The Lamar Dodd School of Art at The University of Georgia; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson New York; Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia; and The Woskob Family Gallery at Penn State University. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Hyperallergic, Art in America, World Sculpture News, Burnaway, and The New Art Examiner have reviewed his work, among other publications. In 2017 Schulte was awarded the inaugural Southern Art Prize Fellowship for the state of Alabama. He has been awarded residencies at The Chinati Foundation (2019), Hambidge Center for Creative Arts (2016), Yaddo (2015), Altantic Center for the Arts (2010), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2010), and Threewalls (2010). Pete Schulte received an MFA in painting and drawing from The University of Iowa in 2008. He is Associate Professor of Art at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 2013 Schulte co-founded, with Amy Pleasant, The Fuel and Lumber Company curatorial initiative. He is represented by McKenzie Fine Art in New York.
