Elena Sarni's solo show combines new paintings and sculptures with a selective retrospective of the most powerful canvases from her series over the past decade. Elena Sarni's art began the past decade by predicting the ultimate victory of painting over the myriad forms of media art that were so recently expected to make the canvas absolete; it ended by celebrating and expanding the victory.

The reascendance of painting restores the artistic experience as a gradual penetration into a stable visual representation that has the potential for transmitting profound meaning. The pendulum is shifting back from the rapid-fire ephermeral and trivial images to the fundamental, to the eternal: in place of the late twentieth century's reductionist works, advertising the artist as a deconstructor of art, Sarni as constructor reasserts the independent significance of the artwork within our common cultural consiousness.

Sarni's works are the rediscovery of moderne, of the Empire style, and of the art of antiquity, which rely upon the emergence of artistic perception from immanent reactions to the aesthetic relationships and to patterns absorbed into cultural traditions. The powerful and recognizable forms and figures, shapes and lines, and especially the remarkably coherent use of color, are drawn from the Great Tradition and combined to create a new entity, a metanarrative of art and the artistic process.

It is perhaps in this sense that Sarni's art has been as a subtle investigation of "the way humans unconciously connect past and present, art and reality, in their dreams and their understanding of the world." (Art News, February 2007).

ELENA SARNI (About the artist)
Elena Sarni was born in the now-vanished Soviet Union and has lived in Europe and now in the US (NYC) for over a decade. Participating in the major art movements of her day, she has exhibited frequently in the core European and US art centers. She holds degrees in art and art history. Ms. Sarni has had numerous personal exhibitions and innumerable group shows in New York. London, Paris and other capitals of the art world. Her works are in museums and important collections both in Europe and the United States.

7 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10013
212.343.29.19
FREE ADMISSION

URL: http://www.elenasarni.net/