LORRAINE PELTZ: LUSTER Exhibition Celebrates Opening Today in Chicago

Hilton | Asmus Contemporary presents LUSTER by Lorraine Peltz. Peltz is a Chicago based artist whose paintings and works on paper examine the ideas of memory, place, and identity. The opening reception is set for today, October 18, 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM.

Peltz's work in this exhibition is everywhere filled with buoyant color, lushly decorative patterning, and the compelling image of a remembered chandelier. These paintings are in keeping with Peltz's larger oeuvre where one finds vast fields of atmospheric color supporting layers of pictorial motifs. Peltz's customary engagement with some of the languages of art-contour drawings, trompe l'oeil rendering and thinly and thickly applied flat areas of paint--appear here again, along with her uncanny way of creating images that seem to slip in and out of focus. These images all beautifully coalesce, in that postmodern way, into provocative tableaux. In these works we see signs and symbols culled both from personal history and the contemporary moment.

The chandelier, an emblem from Peltz's childhood home, reminds us of a past culture. This stands in bold contrast to Peltz's brightly hued palette and patterned and stenciled painting events which bring us firmly to the present into a world occupied by a range of experiences--a world of love, nature, culture, danger, and pleasure.

"The chandelier may serve as a highly personal, profoundly Proustian madeleine for Peltz. But it also offers a wealth of possible readings--private and public, social and historical, unique and stereotypical-to her viewers. There is an innate generosity about the way these paintings leave room for all of us to enter; to experience our own desires and dreams." (Maria Porges, ArtSlant, 2010)

"Ultimately it is the effortless look and the playful sensibility in Peltz's work that gives her authority . . . Peltz has developed a richly appealing body of work dedicated to the exploration of visual meanings and personal and collective symbolism." (Kevin Wilson, Art Ltd, 2012)

Peltz has had numerous solo and group exhibitions including in Chicago at the Packer Schopf Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Gosia Koscielak Gallery, Printworks Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery and the Renaissance Society, and elsewhere at Galerie Piltzer, Paris, Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, NYC, Micaela Gallery, San Francisco, the Rockford Art Museum, the Herbert Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the Elmhurst Art Museum, Incorniciarte Gallery in Verona, Italy and others. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Ltd, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, Flavorpill.com, ArtSlant.com, ArtMoco.com, among others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and City of Chicago Artist Grant and is included in the Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Center. Peltz was selected as a featured artist for Chicago Artist Month in October 2011. Born in Brooklyn, NY, Peltz received her MFA from the University of Chicago and her BFA from SUNY New Paltz. She lives and works in Chicago where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is Peltz's first show at Hilton | Asmus and she appears here in collaboration with Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago.