Andrei Petrov, Pieces of a Thought, 2018, 40″x60″, oil on canvas
The production of a painting begins with a pencil or ink drawing on paper which I extrapolate from and edit as I work the canvas. First with pencil or charcoal and then with color washes done with acrylic or ink, I map the raw canvas and allow it to be ingrained with the materials. Once satisfied with the composition and balance, the surface is sealed with a clear acrylic so as to allow the use of oil based pigments. Handmade tools are used to drag, apply, scrape and blend the paint across the canvas plane. Sandpaper and rags also propel the evolution of the work. The addition and subtraction of paint are meant to act as a metaphor for the intentions and motives for which the paintings are based.
– Andrei Petrov
Andrei Petrov, Staycation, 2019, 40″x40″, oil on canvas
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Fairmont Hotel, Chicago, IL
Four Seasons Hotel, Washington, DC
Four Seasons Hotel, Punta Mita, Mexico
Conrad Hotel, Miami, FL
The Athem, New York, NY
Hotel Plaza Athenee, New York, NY
Andrei Petrov, Pensive Sunday, 2020, 40″x60″, oil on canvasAndrei Petrov, Chiming In, 2015, 38″x72″, oil on canvas
Katherine Mann’s mural “Small Planet” in the HUB-Robeson Center on Sunday, Jan. 12, 2020.
Lindsey Toomer
The HUB-Robeson Center will look more colorful this semester as the HUB Galleries commissioned Katherine Mann to create a new mural for the space.
Mann, an independent artist and Washington, D.C. local, prepared a few potential pieces for selection for the HUB’s newest mural. A work entitled “Small Planet” was chosen, and she worked on the collage elements of the piece throughout the semester in her studio.
“This piece was chosen, I think, because it combined free floating, verdant and textured painting technique with fluid dynamics, maximalism and an interest in the local landscape,” Mann said via email. “Each of the flowers, leaves or branches in the mural is a depiction of a plant or tree that is endemic to Pennsylvania and the region directly around State College.”
Plants scattered throughout the mural include magnolias, fringe trees, tupelos, redbuds, dogwoods and maple leaves, along with other twigs and flowers native to Central Pennsylvania.
“I wanted to take details from the daily scenery of the region – mostly, tree leaves – and use them to populate a fantastic, immersive and imaginary world,” Mann said.
Along with paying attention to the State College landscape, Mann said the mural holds personal significance to her.
“The mural represents, to me, a joyful celebration of the mess of matter that make up the world around us,” Mann said. “The local maple tree on the meridian in the middle of the street might not be given a second glance, but recontextualized into this kaleidoscopic landscape it becomes alien, invites a new appreciation.”
Installed during the final week of the fall 2019 semester, Mann signed the mural with 15 minutes left to spare before the HUB closed for holiday break.
Curator of HUB-Robeson Galleries Lindsey Landfried said she hopes the piece not only touches the Penn State community, but those who visit, as well.
Katherine Mann’s mural “Small Planet” in the HUB-Robeson Center on Sunday, Jan. 12.
Lindsey Toomer
“The HUB-Robeson Center commissioned this work by Katherine Mann to share high quality contemporary art with our students in the spaces they work and engage in during their Penn State experience,” Landfried said via email. “This artwork enriches the University community and its visitors by deepening a sense of place and the experience of space, stimulating viewer curiosity and wellness and ensuring that art engages the educational, cultural and historical dimensions of our environments.”
Landfried praised the mural for being “rich, complex and dynamically and visually arresting” and hopes each student resonates with artwork in their own way.
“We anticipate that students will each have their own response to its physical presence and transformative potential,” Landfried said. “The HUB-Robeson Center is a cultural destination at Penn State, and we activate the arts here in the Union to address today’s complex questions and serve local and global communities through access to the arts.”
Campus Arts Associate Tamryn McDermott helped Mann carefully install and hammer the mural, alongside HUB Galleries staff and student interns.
“Katherine was wonderful to work with,” McDermott said via email. “While we nailed, Katherine added more layers of paper and paint to the mural to integrate her work into the architecture and surrounding space.”
According to McDermott, students would stop by the mural throughout finals week to watch the installation process and ask about the piece. Students thought it added energy to the space.
“One student told us how grateful she was that we were installing the mural for the students to enjoy,” McDermott said. “Another brought up something she learned in one of her psychology classes. She said she learned that plants help to increase productivity.”
McDermott added that the HUB team is looking forward to the student body “seeing new things within the dense and layered surface over time” and enjoying the mural.
Harper’s Magazine features KATHERINE TZU-LAN MANN’s glorious mixed media creation, “Private Domain”. Her work was on view at the Carlow University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh in April.
My work’s abstractions arise from the subjects I portray: ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, my monumentally sized paintings and installations evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. My latest work confronts the challenge: the resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where “landscape” is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms. How can a painting capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms? How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile ecosystem? My paintings explore both questions by sustaining tension between what is artificial and what is natural, between what is chemical and what is biological, between organic and inorganic. The paper on which I paint is not only a recognition of a tradition of Chinese painting; it is also a medium of vulnerability and expansiveness, susceptible to crease and tear as well as to collage and collation. My own role in the creation of the paintings strikes a balance between the purposive and the protective. I trust to process, chance, and change, but I encourage, direct, and facilitate all of these. In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term that sustains us.
Billions is an American television drama series created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin, starring Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis that premiered on Showtime. It launched its fourth season in March 2019.
About ANDREI PETROV
Based in New York City ANDREI PETROV explores memory in his organic abstract paintings. His paintings probe the distortion, incompleteness and rare moments of clarity in the shadows of memory. Each piece portrays the intrinsic struggle and selective inclusion or exclusion of details in the process of recollection. At times, sharpness occurs in the rear of the picture plane while the out of focus, obscured areas, exist in a larger scale toward the foreground and make reference to the inscrutable nature of long and short term memory.
Petrov’s paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally in prestigious collections and can be viewed at The Four Seasons Hotel in both Washington, DC and Punta Mita, Mexico, The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago and The Conrad Hotel, Miami. His paintings have also had cameos in the following films, The Royal Tenenbaums, Autumn in New York, Kate and Leopold, The Business of Strangers and Words and Lyrics. He is the featured visual artist 2016 for Music@Menlo. He is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, D.C.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 