Art Rental & Sales Gallery Winter Exhibition Opening Night Reception

Sarajo Frieden

Sarajo Frieden’s Los Angeles studio borders Thai Town, Little Armenia, and Koreatown and has Guatemalan and Salvadoran bakeries nearby. The cacophony of the area’s hand-painted signs rendered in a variety of languages serves as both an inspiration and a daily reminder to her that the ordinary is often extraordinary. Wandering through her paintings and collages, one finds a host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk, and decorative art, including Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e, and her Hungarian great aunt’s embroidery. Using open-ended narratives, folk tales, abstraction, and the juxtaposition of discordant images, Frieden gives form to the human experience as she sees it.

Barbara Kaleta

Barbara Kaleta paints dramas culled from her life and imagination. Using her emotional connection to an image as a point of departure, her subjects often appear in drawings before being rendered in paint. Kaleta works in a black, calligraphic style, evoking the quality of black-and-white photography and charging her works with sense of moment. In her horse paintings, the animals are frozen in mid-gallop, bridled yet still charging. They are marked with battle scars and handicaps yet possess a sweep of momentum. In her fish series, she uses paints, ink, and charcoal to conjure the subject’s primal essence–its constant rushing against the sea. For each animal, life’s experiences are distilled with a snapshot, captured in stark gestures and raw form.

Art Rental and Sales Gallery, Art of the Americas Building | 5-7 pm | Free, tickets not required | For more information on the exhibition or the gallery, please call 323 857-6500.

Image: Sarajo Frieden, Untitled_231, 2012