NWU's Elder Gallery will showcase the work of Andrew Falkowski in the "Wheel of Life/Tondos" exhibit August 22 through October 15. The exhibit will feature his "Wheel of Life" paintings and the "Skin Deep" Tondo Series. A reception will be held September 1 from 5 to 7 p.m.
Always moving and always turning, Andrew Falkowski’s Tondo paintings have a restless variety of visual, tactile and material inquiry. His "Wheel of Life" paintings play with modernist abstraction, Thanka paintings of the eastern steppes and ancient Greek kylix cups. Their bas relief diagrammatic surfaces have compositions and colors that loosely function as allegorical descriptions of the forces that direct one’s perception.
In the ‘Skin Deep’ Tondo Series, the artwork appears to be discarded tondos casually wrapped in various types of plastic bags, nominally held together by a janky array of adhesive tape. They are, in fact, paintings. Acrylic paint is painstakingly cast and pigmented to be an indexical mirror of common place material surfaces. The 'Skin Deep' series slides between punk rock disenfranchisement, trompe l’oeil fastidiousness and sculptural simulacrum. In addition, Falkowski will present tondo sculptures made from hand-made and assembled plaster chain links. Functioning as an installation, the chain tondos activate the space, exploring how perceptual attention is directed.
Falkowski lives and works in Chicago. His work has been included in exhibitions at the St. Louis Contemporary Museum, in Illinois, California, Missouri and New York and at the Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Mixed Greens, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; and at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. He has exhibited with Rosamund Felsen Gallery since 2004. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1995; his M.A. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1999; and his M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA in 2003.
The Elder Gallery hours are Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 1 to 6 p.m., Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. Elder Gallery is located inside Rogers Center for Fine Arts, 50th Street and Huntington Ave.