Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Exhibition Special Edition, an exhibition of recent paintings by Colin Brant and Ann Pibal. The Exhibition will run from November 5 – December 18, 2021, with a public opening reception on Friday, November 5, from 5:30 – 8 pm.

Brant and Pibal have been living and making art in close proximity to one another since meeting at the University of Iowa in 1992. As partners, they have traveled extensively and have spent extended periods of time in Paris, Baja Mexico and Northern California. Since 1998, Pibal and Brant have split their time between Brooklyn, New York and North Bennington, Vermont with their teenage daughter.

Exhibition Special Edition offers the opportunity to consider how Brant and Pibal’s distinct artistic practices have influenced one another over three decades; The evolution and covalence of these two sensibilities invites the viewer to consider the myriad ways in which figurative and abstract painting operate. In preparing for the exhibition, Brant and Pibal worked together to find relationships between existing works with an expectation that they would identify shared affinities. The results of this exercise took both artists by surprise as they began to uncover direct communication between images previously undiscovered.

Upon first glance, Brant and Pibal’s work appears to inhabit two separate worlds; Pibal uses acrylic paint in flat layers to describe diagrammatic situations of line and color. Her work is engaged in a critical dialog with the history of abstract painting, graphic design and architecture. This is present in geometric form and metallic surfaces, where hard-edged imagery occasionally softens into blended fields of pigment. Brant, on the other hand, makes figurative work with oil paint to describe natural spaces. Light reflections on water, minerals in a glass cabinet, and animals in the wild are glimpses of a fleeting world. Thin washes of color build into spaces which engage personal narratives and address legacies of American landscape painting.

When the work of these two artists is put in direct conversation, we uncover a rich point of intersection — a space in which compositional structures transfer between surfaces and narratives of movement and metamorphosis coalesce. Some of these overlapping ideas are formal, including organization, or color, but some are metaphysical, like the feeling of twilight, when one color shifts to another and points to more transitions to come. Taken as a whole, these identified pairs give rise to new questions about the nature of abstraction and demonstrate the entwined mechanisms of two people working together with a shared vision.