The Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to welcome Los Angeles artist Rachel Lachowicz in her first one-person exhibition at PSG, along with Bay Area artist Kim Anno in her second exhibition at PSG. Exhibition dates are October 18 - November 26, 2005. The artists' reception is November 3, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Rachel Lachowicz is an icon in the feminist lexicon of contemporary art. Her irreverent play with Modernist canons mixes wit with humor. Lachowicz uses eye shadow and face powder, casting the pigments in aluminum tins, welding the tins to infrastructures of her making. Early work was a deliberate parody of important works of art plucked from the history of Modernism, however recent work is a departure from the appropriation of image to a more subtle interplay of painterly ideas - the blending of pigments within divisions of the formed structure. The idea of melding pigments to envelop the ponderous expression of the brush entails an acrobatic manipulation of pigments. The insinuations of the palette knife, or brush as captured by Lachowicz, have elevated Lachowicz from appropriator to originator.

In Lachowicz's first one-person exhibition at Patricia Sweetow Gallery she will present 3 floor sculptures, and 3 wall works elucidating the mastery of media, and maturity of concept. In 2003 she received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Lachowicz was invited to participate in Aperto 93, an emerging artist pavilion in the Venice Biennale. She is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Denver Art Museum, CO, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Palais Lichtenstein, Vienna, Austria, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

On view in Kim Anno's second exhibition at PSG, will be four oil paintings on aluminum panel, where color, calligraphic line and light interact. As with Anno's first show at PSG the continuation of nuance in Anno's paintings have resolved with the blush of color, the scarring of aluminum, and the lyricism of line. Her current work on aluminum evolved from earlier work of oil washes on gold and silver leaf. Her resolution of an aluminum support provides a dense, semi-reflective surface, where Anno can seek the "provocation between illusionism and abstraction". She accomplishes this by both varying the thickness of oil washes and affixing thin, fragmentary, handmade lines (marks) to the surface. These lines float and fuse within the painted field, her idea of "... trying to create the last abstract painting I can make before it becomes narrative," illuminates both the work and her intent.

Anno mentions that Ukiyo-e prints are of particular influence in her work, citing the calligraphic lines and the floating, temporal world depicted. Also recognizable is the translucent, ethereal color tints these prints exhibit. Anno also talks of textiles draping across the body, the slow mercurial undulation of line, hand written texts, and Asian, Middle Eastern and African vernacular architecture, including the architecture of the imagination. These influences "articulate the vulnerability of the painting, where the painting falls down, where it is imperfect. This beautiful difficulty is fascinating to me."

Anno has received the 2002 Fleishhacker Foundation Fellowship from the Eureka Foundation,

a Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Honolulu Academy of Art Museum, Western States Regional/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Creative Work Fund grant of the Walter and Elise Haas Foundation, the Joseph S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship at Yaddo for her collaboration with Anne Carson, and the Flintridge Foundation Fellowship.

Public collections include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Honolulu Academy of Fine Art, Brooklyn Museum, Herzog-Anton Ulrich Museum, Germany; Oakland Museum; Kresge Museum, Michigan State University; University of California Berkeley Library.