Zafos Xagoraris: AnthroTopography and James Kao: Paintings

Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery
1646 N. Bosworth Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
T.847.858.1540
http://www.gosiakoscielak.com


Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery Presents:

Zafos Xagoraris: AnthroTopography
Sound Installations, Photography and Drawings

James Kao: New Paintings

07. 14 - 08.10.2007
Opening reception: 07.14.2007 6 - 10pm
Part of the Wicker Park Bucktown Gallery Association 2nd Saturday Gallery Walk.

For more info:
http://www.gosiakoscielak.com
847.858.1540



Zafos Xagoraris lives and works in Athens, Greece. He is a multimedia artist who successfully combines sound installation, painting and video.
His paintings on paper are predominantly black and white, with deep layers of black and sometimes midnight blue acrylic scumbled with deft brushwork and graceful gestural drawings of people and things on corresponding white space. The drawings depict crowd scenes with identical figures in vast landscapes and emblematic machines of observation-probation, architectural elements and volcanoes. Human figures like dark black marks, turned upside down and burning, spaces of enclosure, isolation and entrapment, movements, crashes, catastrophes and conflicts all undermine and confine the sight in unfinished fluid pictures. His paintings often contain the simple but culturally complex form of a bell buried in the earth.

Xagoraris’s paintings and sound installations are based on recording and later broadcasting the silence of Cyprus’s abandoned villages after the partition of the island between Turks and Greeks. His works represent absence and displacement built up in a poetic accumulation of images and concepts spanning human history from the time of the ancient bell to the digital times. The tone of his work is reflective and melancholy.
Xagoraris took part in Paradigmata, Greek participation at the 9th Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in The 27th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.


James Kao presents a suite of new paintings that speak forthrightly to abstraction through direct observation. Kao's repeated motifs of tables and common still-life objects shed unexpected sentimentality as they dialogue with his convergent lebensforms paintings.

In 2006 Kao graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing. In the past two years, Kao has exhibited in group shows at Around the Coyote Arts Festival, Heaven Gallery, and the Beverly Arts Center, and at the Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery. The artist lives, works and teaches in Chicago.