Main Gallery, June 17 - July 12th, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, Thursday June 19th 6-8 PM
Press Release

The Painting Center is pleased to present Ryan Cobourn, Bloom and Sangram Majumdar, Form & Fiction in the Main Gallery fromune 17 - July 12th, 2008.

Ryan Cobourn is currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and his MFA from Indiana University. Since then he has been exhibiting in group and solo exhibitions across the country. He currently shows at The Painting Center in SoHo, Agittato Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, and ACFA Gallery in Louisiana. His work has been shown at the Pii Gallery and Freeman’s Auction House in Philadelphia. A permanent installation is on view at Harrah’s in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ryan Cobourn’s paintings, drawings, and collages move freely between representation and abstraction. His images are derived from natural reference, but almost always stray towards abstraction. Drawing from both direct experience and pictorial invention, the paintings straddle the line between what is seen and what is felt, between perception and invention.

Sangram Majumdar’s paintings are grounded in perceptual empiricism as much as they are in the sense of memory’s role in what our eyes claim and our brain acknowledges as truth. In a time when reality is more virtual than physical, and our sense of space is quantified in minutes and seconds, questions of the self, hover in and out of existence. Instead, it is the physical and intimate experience of learning and knowing something over time slowly that comprises these works. In it, the play between the factual and formal narrative remain constant as facets of the perceptual are echoed back in quick glimpses or peripheral whispers, and at other times in sustained silence. This show marks Majumdar’s first New York exhibition, who has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from Indiana University. He has exhibited widely including the Museum of Art, Rochefort-en-Terre, France, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan, Indiana University Art Museum, Madison Art Center and C. Grimaldis Gallery, MD. His work is also currently on view at University of Baltimore Law Gallery in Baltimore, MD and Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, IL. He is represented by Ann Nathan Gallery and lives and works in Baltimore, MD.