C12 Emerging Artists to Open Exhibition at Hunter College, 5/31

Hunter College presents an exhibition of work by C12 Emerging Artists Fellows Nobutaka Aozaki and Alex Nuñez, on view from May 31-June 15, 2013. The exhibition, held at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, 118 East 64th Street, celebrates the first two recipients of the C12 Emerging Artist Award, which is bestowed each semester on a graduating student from Hunter College's highly competitive MFA in Studio Art program.

The first C12 Emerging Artists Fellow, Nobutaka Aozaki (b. 1977 in Kagoshima, Japan), has built a compelling body of conceptualist work that examines the conditions and contexts through which artistic value and meaning is produced. Combining appropriative strategies with his own unique brand of deadpan conceptualism, Aozaki mines the everyday for his creative material. Using fleeting social interactions and commonplace commercial products as the basis for his art, Aozaki creates artwork that challenges traditional notions of authorship and raises broad questions about the status of the art object and the value society ascribes to it.

Working primarily on canvas and paper, Alex Nuñez (b. 1984 in Miami, Florida) combines meticulous mark making with a staining method in which she pours pigments directly onto the surfaces of her compositions, where it pools and gathers in unpredictable fashion. Alternating between controlled and uncontrolled activity, her work explores the tension between the illusionistic depiction of space and the physical surface of the composition. By infusing her luminous surfaces with signs and symbols of personal significance, Nuñez creates distinctive pictorial spaces that function as meditations on the subjective and the familiar, the hidden and the visible.

Hunter College gratefully acknowledges C12 Capital Management for its generous support, and Marianne Boesky for the generous donation of her gallery space for this exhibition.

The Hunter College Art Galleries, under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter-century ago. Widely regarded as one of the leading art programs in the country, Hunter College's Department of Art serves both undergraduate and graduate populations, offering a full undergraduate major in Art, a BFA and an MFA in Studio Art, and an MA in Art History. In its 2012 rankings of "America's Best Graduate Schools," U.S. News & World Report ranked Hunter's Master of Fine Arts program 13th in the nation, and within this, the painting and drawing program 7th.