FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DANA HOEY
Photographs

CHARLINE VON HEYL
Paintings

Opening reception: Friday, March 31, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Charline von Heyl and photographs by Dana Hoey. The opening reception is Friday, March 31, from 6 to 8pm.

In this latest body of work Charline Von Heyl pushes farther away from figuration and deeper into the realm of abstraction. The oil on canvas paintings, from 1999 and 2000, reflect a stronger intensity between color, shape and form. Large, gestural brushstrokes move against floating masses of color to create a lush and textured surface. The palette is a range of colors from primary blues and reds to shades of pink and orange. Von Heyl's paintings possess an independence that is created through her strong painterly style. In this sense, her paintings defy specific categorization and allow the viewer a pure visual experience.

Dana Hoey's photographs establish windows into the often cruel, troubled and invisible dynamics of female relationships. With this new series of work, the reality of male sexual presence decisively enters the frame, manifesting itself physically, emotionally and symbolically. Photographed in New York and Hawaii, these four intensely colored cibachromes are loaded with a masculine sexual power that metamorphoses into specific visual structures: two 3x divorcees consort with an enormous Hawaiian boar, a professional triathelete urges three faceless, bikini-clad teenagers to submit to physical instruction on a black sand beach, a Polynesian male confronts three teenagers in a tropical rainforest and a nude emerging male painter reclines with an established female art world figure.

Charline von Heyl currently has exhibitions at Works on Paper in Los Angeles and at the James van Damme Gallery in Brussels. Dana Hoey's work is currently on exhibit in Girlfriend at Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig, Greater New York, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, and Fact/Fiction: Contemporary Art That Walks the Line at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.