Lola Montes Schnabel
Love Before Intimacy
December 16th, 2011 - February 4th, 2012
OPENING December 16th, 6-9PM
The Hole is proud to present a new group of paintings by Lola Montes Schnabel. These five works, created over the period of the last year, comprise a suite of allegorically suggestive figurative paintings that use a shared five-color palette to great effect.
Each painting depicts an episode in a narrative of androgenous youth encountering each other on a remote Greek island. They depict a time of love before sexuality, with the nude youths, occasionally shrouded in sheepskins, romping playfully about the teal and tan landscape. In one work, a youth drags a dead albatross across an expanse, in another, the last in the series, the two figures come together in ecstasy, forever changing their innocent, idyllic world.
The works each begin with bleached linen and rabbit glue. Lola then engaged the surface with a five color palette reminiscent of the restrictive color schemes of the Spanish Romantics or the lucky five-color Ko-Kutani school of Japanese ceramics. Not just paint but asphalt, plaster weld, and copper plating solution are part of her toolbox, making the painting not just an assorment of emmoliated pigments, but the site of a rich alchemical reaction as the plasterweld slowly dries clear and the copper plating oxidizes and chrystallizes.
Magic, luck and intuition fill these large, confident, and very feminine tableaux. Lola graduated from Cooper Union in 2008 and has been in numerous group shows since, with both her paintings, her iodine works on paper, photographs and video work. This is her first solo painting exhibition in the United States.
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