"I view my creative process as a dynamic relationship between the artwork and myself. At times it even seems as if it is a sort of 'dance'. As I move back and forth between spontaneity and evaluation the painting, or pastel piece, reaches its final end result. For me, this blend of chance and careful planning is an apt metaphor for life."
- Val Rossman
Your First Bite, 40" x 40", Acrylic On Panel
Val Rossman has been working as a professional artist for over 40 years. During her career she has had more than 21 one-person shows and been in numerous group shows in Philadelphia, Delaware, Vermont, New Jersey, Florida and New York. She has won several prizes, including the Award for Excellence at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, and at the Cheltenham Art Center Annual Painting Show.
In addition, Rossman was on the faculty of Main Line Art Center from 1994-2016 as a teacher of abstract art. From 2016 until the present she has been teaching at Wayne Art Center and Woodmere Art Museum. She has lectured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and held a workshop at the River Arts Center in Vermont. Her work has also been seen on Bravo Cable Television.
Rossman’s work has been collected by both individual and corporate clients in the U.S. and abroad. Some of these collectors include Blue Cross of Greater Philadelphia, AT&T, United Pacific Life Insurance, MasterCard International, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank, Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and Hebrew University.
Her work has gone through various stages, however, her wonderful sense of color combined with a lyrical and often whimsical mentality have always infused her drawings with a lush and personal aura. The combination of rich and unexpected hues and gestures, sometimes with questioning formats, give Rossman's work an unforgettable presence.
Til Friday Comes, 12" x 12", Acrylic On Aluminum
“My work seeks to find throughlines from the ancient past to present to future. I want to know how things change through time and how they stay the same.”
- Morgan Hobbs
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Chronolith, Morgan Hobbs’ first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and with the gallery.
Guest writer Lauren Whearty says: “Hobbs’ body of work focuses on the slow and methodical process of building a language - a new form of communication through paint, papier-mâché, and image. Each symbolic form is a building block for a wide array of possibilities with the potential to make new meaning through different combinations, or to break down the strength of an individual symbol into a more democratic piece of a larger whole.
While I recognized many of the symbols from her previous bodies of work, like the interiors in her Bell the Cat series, the forms now exist on their own free to roam the studio and assert themselves as sculptures and whole compositions in dimensional paintings. The forms are still understood as ornamental symbols, however, the mass of the sculptures and the dimensional qualities in the paintings give a more architectural feeling and weight to each glyph. The duality of the actual weight vs the perceptual weight is just one of the many elements of tension presented in this work. The works also perform a balancing act between painting and sculpture, and between the single vs the many.
“I believe artists must make space for pleasure in painting, both in the act of painting and in the pleasure of viewing it.”
-Lauren Whearty
In her first solo exhibition with Gross McCleaf Gallery, titled Painter’s Table, Lauren Whearty celebrates cheerful color and playful patterns in a contemporary take on the artistic tradition of still life painting. With a keen eye for possibilities within this genre, Whearty embraces a feminist perspective, using everyday objects as building blocks to create her own distinctive universe. Each item she incorporates becomes a referential exploration of art history and the process of image creation, adding depth and meaning to her work.
Spontaneous bursts of gestural expression meet carefully planned and executed drafting in Val Rossman’s new body of abstract works. Unexpected Interference features two varieties of exploration from Rossman’s multi-faceted painting practice of layered geometric compositions and energetically marked, achromatic configurations. Each variation of Rossman’s approach combines elements of chance and moments of orchestration, both of which are fundamental to her pursuits. Rossman finds her works to be analogous to life’s common challenges, and it is in the tension created by these opposing strategies where Rossman’s work flourishes and meaning is found...
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Natasha Das and Max Mason and a collection of mini exhibitions, featuring the work of Giovanni Casadei, Rhea Cutillo, Ying Li, Scott Noel, Thomas Paquette, Jeffrey Reed and Val Rossman.
Textures created with thread are to Natasha Das what brushstrokes are for other artists: fundamental, visceral, expressive elements. Das’ labor-intensive compositions convey her unique voice by representing an engagement with both abstraction and the weaving tradition of her native India, lending an autobiographical component to her work. . .
