"The Universe and the Side of My Body," a huge study in red oil on wood by Kim Manfredi, is not just an eye-catcher in the new show at C. Grimaldis Gallery. It's deeply provocative.
A couple of sagging globs of paint on the upper portion of the four, 96-inch-square panels seem to be on the verge of shifting downward, threatening to invade two circular images formed by the perforation of tiny holes with a drill. Those orbs simultaneously suggest microscopic cells and planets adrift in a blood-dense sky.
The piece is representative of the intriguing premise of "Sublime Structure," an exhibit that features several Maryland Institute College of Art alumni.
The various objects reference "invisible structures, including microscopic organisms, chemical formulations, analogue images, and cosmological formations," as Virginia Adams, a faculty member at MICA, writes in the show catalog. Adams also makes a point of defining "sublime" here as something emotionally intense, even painful or frightening, not necessarily beautiful or transcendent.
Gallery owner Costas Grimaldis started planning the show last spring, using as a starting point Effie Halivopoulou, whose work he has long admired. "She deals with the image of code, whether DNA or linguistic," Grimaldis says. "From there, I wanted to see what else would work with her [art]. It wasn't particularly easy."
But it was productive. The result is a diverse, yet complementary, collection.
Halivopoulou's bold, large-scale abstracts, which combine acrylic, resin and photographs into statements animated by allusions to the human body, form a major part of the exhibit.
She also offers a short digital video, "Transgenic Trauma," that delves deeply into the concept of what lies underneath the "structure" of the human body. The artist is first seen in a silent scream. The camera then seems to push its way down her throat and into the esophagus, where a sharp object begins digging into tissue, before the fanciful visual animation evolves into a Dali-esque sequence.
In addition to the red painting, Manfredi is represented by other works that fuse her interest in the cosmic and minute. "Mars Phenom" explores her interest in the expressive possibilities of spherical objects, here achieved simply and starkly; "For Franz West," a set of four wood panels drenched in soothing Pepto-Bismol pink, gets its character from subtle variations in the application of the paint.
