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Eva Bovenzi | Present Perfect

date. March 11 thru April 23

opening. March 11. 5 - 8 pm

"I’ve never grown blasé about the fact that a painting can actually summon people to the present moment; it seems like a form of magic”, Eva Bovenzi writes. She titles this exhibition “Present Perfect” in a nod to the capacity of art to bring a viewer to the Now.

Bovenzi’s visual vocabulary is poetic and entirely her own. Her paintings are fresh and original, yet also read as timeless iconic forms. Having studied sources as varied as Spanish manuscript painting, Romanesque and Byzantine frescoes, Tantric images and Native American ceremonial objects, Bovenzi describes herself as “in the tradition of artists who have tried to give visible form to the invisible”. Her work deliberately evades an easy verbal summary, gesturing towards the ineffability of experience.

Alluding to the shapes of shields, sentinels and masks, Bovenzi's images are bold, emphasizing physicality—yet their materiality is countered by luminescent veils of color that seem to expand past the structures that contain them. Constructed with matte, fluorescent and metallic colors, the surfaces of the paintings alternately absorb and reflect light, adding a subtle depth and movement to the work.

Eva Bovenzi’s art simultaneously suggests solid and void, presence and emptiness, stillness and movement. Mysteriously emblematic, the work’s sheer beauty offers the viewer an experience of transcendence, inviting the present to become perfect.

Eva Bovenzi is a Bay Area artist, with an MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has exhibited her work locally at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Kala Institute, David Cunningham Projects, the Graduate Theological Union, the Berkeley Art Center, the Bedford Gallery, Transmission Gallery, and Toomey Tourell Fine Arts, among others. Nationally, she has shown at the Phoenix Museum of Art, the ICPNY in New York City, Michael Warren Contemporary/Denver, the Jancar Gallery/Los Angeles, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Seattle Museum Gallery. Internationally, she has exhibited in the the 5th Annual Biennal of Painting in Cuenca, Ecuador, and the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy.  

Bovenzi was an NEA Fellow at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Through the support of artists’ residencies —the Djerassi and Ucross Foundations, the Lucid Art Foundation, and the Manilva and Valparaiso Fundaciones in Spain—she has been privileged to spend time living and painting in natural environments, which has been important to the development of her work. Since 2004 she has spent summers in rural Colorado, in a high river valley in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
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works in show

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