Exhibition Review by Heidi De Vries at SFWeekly

November 7, 2012

“Sometimes art is at its most powerful when it takes a familiar scene and dislocates it just slightly, gives it a new context. We stop and look more closely because we suddenly see details we usually overlook, or even because the piece reminds us of something we’ve felt before. Narangkar Glover and Gwen Manfrin are a pair who employ very different techniques when it comes to their art-making, but in their two-person show at Andrea Schwartz Gallery’s beautiful new digs both artists exhibit a strong interest in the psychological aspects of experience and the interior life. Glover’s recent series of colossal landscapes depict contrasts between water and earth as a river carves its way through a canyon or torrents crash against high chasm walls. The paintings evoke powerful feelings of isolation through Glover’s use of perspective, placing the viewer right at the foot of those cliffs, and her mastery of darkness and light on the canvas. Manfrin by contrast concentrates almost exclusively on human bodies, specifically those of teenage girls, but the emotions associated with separation and uncertainty appear in her work as well. In drawings rendered almost photorealistic in graphite, Manfrin captures young women at that poignant moment between childhood and adulthood, when confidence battles self-consciousness. Glover and Manfrin peer right into the psyche itself.”

Article: http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-10-31/calendar/figure-and-landscape/full/