Corey Helford Gallery Presents 'All Creatures Great and Small' (6/25)

Five-Artist Exhibition Featuring
Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak, Dewi Plass, Matt Dangler,
Phillip Singer, and Richard Ahnert

OPENING RECEPTION
June 25, 2022 | 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm

ON VIEW
June 25 – July 30, 2022

Click here for sample of exhibit images

Downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) is proud to announce All Creatures Great and Small, a five-artist exhibition featuring new works by Polish contemporary artist Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak, Dutch artist Dewi Plass, mystical painter Matt Dangler, surreal oil painter Phillip Singer, and Toronto-based artist Richard Ahnert, opening on June 25th in Gallery 2.

Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak’s oil paintings are a combination of still life, nature, and fantasy. The Warsaw, Poland-based artist creates rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made of materials, as if woven out of thread and decorative fabrics. In her works, Prończuk-Kuziak uses intensely saturated colors, which illustrate the vibrancy of the world her characters inhabit.

Regarding her new works, entitled Life is Good, Prończuk-Kuziak shares, “With this latest series, I continued working with concepts I’ve been building upon in recent exhibitions. When talking about my art, I always emphasize that it’s based on emotions. The paintings are like short stories or snapshots of reality, in which each of them has a guiding emotion. I focus on the complexity of human feelings, I love painting their diversity and ambiguity.” She adds, “The new works are more personal, although I strongly believe what I’m expressing in them is universal and affects almost every person at some point in their life. So, I tell about the need for change, about the courage to make decisions and, at the same time, about the enormous fear connected with it. About adulthood, in which we face the awareness of time passing faster and faster and about the confrontation between dreams and reality. And also about motherhood and the incredible carousel of feelings that a mother has to deal with. In some ways, Life is Good is my diary of the past months. Life, despite its undeniable unpredictability, despite the many difficulties and trials it puts us through, is a string of miracles and surprises, and as the years go by, we appreciate more and more what we have lived through and what is yet to come. No matter how complicated it gets - life is good.” Life is Good follows her solo Happiness is Easy at CHG in April 2020.

Using acrylic as her medium, Dewi Plass creates artworks in which animals take the center stage within worlds that invite the viewer to let go of all that’s familiar and instead explore the unexpected. Regarding her new works, entitled Entanglements, Plass shares, “Inspired by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ‘lines of becoming,’ a concept elaborated upon by the anthropologist Tim Ingold in his book The Life of Lines, where life is understood as an open-ended process of following lines, I have placed the life of lines at the center of this new series. Life, the process of becoming, is defined as a gathering of lines, or threads, through which we follow the ways of the world as they unfold, entangle and unravel. These lines become meaningful through our continuous engagement with them within the ever-extending trajectories through which we wander.”

Adding, “Starting from the premise that these threads of our existence are in constant motion invites us to attend life in its immediacy and to embrace our capacity to affect and be affected. To me, it also implies that vulnerability lies at the heart of our being in this world, as we set out on a thread of longing that doesn’t allow us to linger in the past or control our future. I am fascinated by the fragility of this ‘life process’ and the tension that arises once we try to hold on to things in a world that can’t be contained. For life isn’t a neatly wound ball of yarn, but an ‘improvised’ assembly of threads with knots, loops and many open ends. It’s the lines of becoming and the open-endedness of life that I wish to celebrate in this new body of work, allowing things to connect as well as to unravel. By focusing on threads as a visual representation of the delicate yet strong entanglements that constitute life, I aimed to explore the way they play a role in our process of becoming and the fragility that lies at its core.”

Born in 1990, the Netherlands-based visual artist has had a fascination for nature and a profound love for the visual arts that unfolded itself from an early age. However, she was very certain that she did not want to go to art school, and so she pursued an academic career in Cultural and Visual Anthropology from which she graduated in 2014. Although Plass found great joy in putting her academic skills into practice, there was that one other passion that had been left unexplored for quite a while: translating the intangible images and stories that she had in her mind into visible, tangible sensations that could be shared with others. This is why, in 2015, she decided to focus on her development as a full-time visual artist, and since then her artwork has been shown in galleries across the world.

Matt Dangler has been exhibiting his wondrously mystical paintings for over 15 years. The artist constructs fantastically-inspired and engaging imagery, which contains the power to reveal new and undiscovered aspects of the personalities in each and every one of us, by speaking directly to our subconscious and therefore our inherent inner beings. Growing up in New Jersey by the shore and hiking many trails through the woods, inspired a lot of the imaginary oceanic and woodland creatures that appear in Dangler’s art. He likes to think of the characters he creates as expressive manifestations, opposed to being physical creatures.

Regarding his new series, entitled The Mystical Circus, Dangler shares, “The new series is about the truth hidden behind the big show, the dark realities we must accept to take us beyond the entertaining facade. This idea has been in development throughout my life, watching myself and society perform out of ego, trying to impress one another. However, the more I explored this behavior, I began to realize the only person we need to impress is ourself. Not to be mistaken, this is no simple task. We must first discover the facade we show, explore the performance and see backstage--in the dark corners and rooms of our psyche--to take on what we’re trying to avoid. Only there can we make peace with everything that we are. But this process is life itself, this is the show of self-awakening...so let’s enjoy the act before the curtains close.”

Adding, “Aesthetically speaking, I wanted the work to play with the feelings of nostalgia. A juxtaposition of what’s happening in the present to appear like it’s in the past. Creating a dream-like quality that I felt aligned with the concept of seeing beyond the surface of things. This was technically accomplished through using very subtle warm tones against the colder grays. A very simple color palette that’s reminiscent of the late 1800s and early 1900s Victorian photographs, a delicate balance to achieve a specific mood. The work also focuses on subtle gradations to capture the movement of delicate light across forms, in contrast against textural elements. This helped create believable characters, pushing their tangible quality. Additionally, I love the idea of performers under a spotlight within an abyssal darkness. This creates an atmosphere of how one might think of ourselves in the world or perhaps within ourselves, giving a clear focus for us to examine what we’re presenting. Lastly, I hunted down ornate frames that feel like they were lifted out of a circus or carnival. I hand painted and distressed each frame, to achieve the Victorian antique quality.”

2020 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize winner, Phillip Singer, combines illustration influences with his appreciation for painters of the 18th century and a strong affection for surrealism. A boundless supply of imagery and a love of oil painting continues to help the artists unique vision evolve. Regarding his new works, entitled Adaptation, Singer shares, “When I was five, I thought I might have a chance to teach our cat to talk. We learn to put away childish things as we get older and for the most part, I have, I just haven’t thrown them away. All paintings start as a simple desire to render a subject and make it look real, which may not sound magical to most but has always been exciting to me. In these paintings the subjects are of course the animals themselves. I see each creature as a living, breathing object of art. When juxtaposed in some alien world. the animals stand in as prophets of our future, characters in our dreams, and teachers.” He adds, “The pieces here are not inspired by any particular idea, other than a simple wonder and amusement of the world around us. As these ideas are sketched, I ask myself if each image is worthwhile, is there something compelling to ponder? I feel these combinations will help the viewer consider how we might adapt to our rapidly changing world. I hope the viewer will bring their own interpretations.”

Singer has been a working artist since 1989, when he graduated from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In the early part of his career he created paintings for clients such as Celestial Seasonings Tea, Merck Pharmaceutical, Forbes, National Geographic, and numerous New York Publishers including Avon, Harper Collins and Viking Books. His first love was illustration. However, a desire to create his own paintings overtook his illustration career. All of those experiences contributed to the growth of his painting and helped shape his own version of realism.

Richard Ahnert takes anthropomorphic painting to a new level, lacing it with a quiet, yet unmistakable animism – an abiding kinship between human and animal. He uses the relationship between animals and humans to explore themes of emotion, metaphor, and narrative with a satirical twist. Storytelling, understated humor, and deep reflection are at the heart of his practice. In his new series, entitled Memento, Ahnert welcomes us into real and imagined moments of homelife, musing, amusing, and bemusing with warmth, wit, and nostalgia. He shares, “This collection captures those simple moments that preface what’s to come. These moments are in and of themselves fleeting, unimportant, but somehow, looking back upon a time, a place, these nothings can add up to everything.” The artist leaves room in each piece for us to participate in creating and recreating the narrative so the story is shared between artist and viewer.

Ahnert graduated with honors from the Arts York program from Unionville High School in Ontario, Canada, with a major in Visual Arts, and went on to study Technical Illustration and Graphic Design at York University and Seneca College, graduating with the Presidents Honor Roll for Highest Academic Achievement. With a drive to explore and evolve as an artist, Ahnert continues his studies and participates in workshops to help define his style and practice. The artist began exhibiting his work in 2010 and has shown in exhibitions and galleries in both Canada and the U.S. (including his last showing at CHG, a mini-solo When We Met (Aug. 2021)). His work has won awards and can be found in private collections and businesses around the world.

All Creatures Great and Small opens Saturday, June 25th from 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm in Gallery 2, alongside a solo exhibition from Hikari Shimoda, entitled Fight to Live in the Void, in the Main Gallery and a solo exhibition from Ryoko Kaneta, entitled In Our Nature, in Gallery 3. Until further notice, masks continue to be required for entry into the gallery, regardless of vaccination status.

About Corey Helford Gallery:
Established in 2006 by Jan Corey Helford and her husband, television producer/creator Bruce Helford (The Conners, Anger Management, The Drew Carey Show, and George Lopez), Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) has since evolved into one of the premier galleries of New Contemporary art. Its goal as an institution is supporting the growth of artists, from the young and emerging, to the well-known and internationally established. CHG represents a diverse collection of international artists, primarily influenced by today's pop culture and collectively encompassing style genres such as New Figurative Art, Pop Surrealism, Neo Pop, Graffiti, and Street Art. Located in downtown Los Angeles at 571 S. Anderson St. Los Angeles, CA 90033, in a robust 12,000 square foot building, CHG presents new exhibitions approximately every six weeks. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm, with visiting hours being Thursday through Saturday from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm. For more info and an upcoming exhibition schedule, visit CoreyHelfordGallery.com and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. For available prints from CHG, visit CHGPrints.com.