ART 3 Opens CLAUDIA BAEZ, PAINTINGS AFTER PROUST Today

ART 3 opened in May 2014 in Bushwick near Luhring Augustine, with its Inaugural Exhibition covered by The New York Times T Magazine, Primer. ART 3 was created by Silas Shabelewska, formerly of Haunch of Venison and Helly Nahmad Gallery.

ART 3 presents CLAUDIA BAEZ, PAINTINGS after PROUST curated by Anne Strauss, an independent curator, formerly Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view at ART 3, 109 Ingraham Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn, from today, October 8 to November 22, 2014, Thu-Sat 12-6 PM. The opening is on Wednesday, October 8, from 6-9 PM.

"In PAINTINGS after PROUST, Baez offers us an innovative chapter in contemporary painting in ciphering her art via a modernist work of literature within a postmodernist framework." Raul Zamudio

Claudia Baez' paintings are animated by reverence for the history of Western art, rendered in a contemporary expressionistic vocabulary. In her most recent series PAINTINGS after PROUST, Baez engages in a conversation in paint with the work of some of the greatest artists from the past six centuries. She selects, re-creates, and adopts details from images catalogued by Eric Karpeles (himself a painter) in his book Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to "In Search of Lost Time" (New York, 2008). The monumental literary work, In Search of Lost Time, written by the Nobel Prize winning French novelist Marcel Proust in 19091922, is one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature. Proust mentions more than one hundred artistsfrom Bellini to Whistlerin the novel, referencing a great many of their works.

Baez, a longtime admirer of Proust, was inspired to create her own Proust-related series. The result of this thrice-sifted reimagining of cultural references through layers that engage the text and the image is very personal. Sometimes her compositions are richly developed and nuanced, others are highly abstract and pared down, their forms rendered with daubs of color. Baez' interpretation of Vermeer's View of Delft is severely distilled compared to the highly detailed original; at times she merely suggests the essence of the source, as in her version of Velazquez's La Infanta Maria Teresa.

A catalogue with texts by Anne Strauss, curator of the exhibition, and Raul Zamudio, curator, Whitebox Art Center, New York, accompanies the exhibition.

About the artist: www.art-3gallery.com

Contact: Silas Shabelewska-Von Morisse, 646 331 3162, info@art-3gallery.com

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140917/146876

SOURCE ART 3