Local Places, New Spaces: Paintings by Bob Stanley

EXHIBIT

Friday, June 13th – Sunday, July 6th

Opening Reception:

Friday, June 13th | 5-7pm

“In ‘Local Places, New Spaces,’ familiar views are created to give different meaning and enjoyment. Dune grasses and charred wood from a beach fire now suggest the passing of time and energies not visible. Beach sand becomes a pattern hinting at the cosmic creation of the innumerable objects in our world.” – Bob Stanley

About the Artist:

Robert Stanley was born in Florida and received his undergraduate degree at the University of Dayton and a Masters degree from Pratt Institute in New York.

While teaching college in Pennsylvania and Illinois, he exhibited artworks around the USA and Europe, including The William Penn Museum in Harrisburg PA, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Chamaliere, France, Midwest Museum of Art, The Brauer Museum, Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Koehnline Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, and Evanston (IL) Art Center.

His art is in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and has been written about in 2001 International Digital Art Awards, L’Association Musee D’Art Contemporain “Une Brève et Ample Énonciation,” the Koehnline Museum of Art’s Artwalk at Oakton, the Chicago Tribune, and The New Art Examiner.

Brauer Museum Curator Gregg Hertzlieb wrote that the work “sets up a dialogue between observation and invention, realism and abstraction that grows into a lively, even stormy exchange.”

Stanley’s influences are broad: Johns, Kandinsky, Diebenkorn, Sally Mann, and Bill Viola, as well as biologist E.O. Wilson and physicist Edward Lorenz. His works jostle images of contemporary and timeless people, nature, science, and abstract thinking and emotions. They dance between chaos and order, as does the world. Energies, often unnoticed, flow in this world. Hidden forces flow through humans, too. Enigmatic currents bring people together or separate them, bring desperation, or give meaning to life. Objects, spaces, and dissonances in my works are full of emotion, order, and enigma.

Now living near Chicago in a wooded area along the lake, he combines images of people, the city, and nature in personal and thoughtful adventures.