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For Immediate Release
JAN PETRY
Juicy
Exhibition Dates: May 30 – July 2, 2008
Artist’s Reception: Friday, May 30, 5:00 – 8:00 P.M.
Carl Hammer
Gallery is pleased to introduce the sculptural mastery of Jan
Petry in her first solo show appearance. The artist,
trained in graphic design, spent most of her professional life
as an associate director in advertising, yet she comes to this
point in her life with the discipline and creative vision of one
who has practiced making art all her life. A born collector,
Petry has developed an exceptional fondness for objects both
natural and man made. From her collecting impulse she
discovered a desire to also create, to make things. For the
past decade and a half, she has labored with loving intensity
over the creation of this gratifying body of work.
Specifically,
Petry works with wood creating an end result that is
simultaneously seductive and organic. Using the material
instinctively and deriving pleasure in discovering both its
sensuous tactility and its visual color variations, her
exploration of the way different wood yields itself up to her
selection and manipulation likens the process to the image
evoking creative writing of, say, a William Carlos Williams.
The homage Petry makes to the universal and elemental themes of
Brancusi, Giacometti, and other modern masters of 20th
century sculpture making is obvious but not imitative. Like
them, she evidences her fascination for all things
ethnographic. Her pieces touch also upon the themes of the
minimalism evidenced clearly throughout the last half of the
same century. The last part of Petry’s creative “process”
brings us full circle, combining natural world materials to
intriguingly unusual man made found objects. This marriage, of
sorts, performs a consciously produced dialogue between the man
made object and the natural world materials.
Finding that the
creative process is its own reward, Jan Petry has carved out a
very special niche in this summer’s offerings of gallery
exhibitions here in Chicago. We feel especially enriched by the
presence of her interpretative vision.
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