OPENING RECEPTION: 1st THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2025 | FROM 5:00 - 8:00pm
Sullivan Goss is proud to present an exciting new solo exhibition for painter ANGELA PERKO entitled Imagined Landscapes & Other Stories. Comprising seventeen paintings that the artist completed over the last two years – and one work from 2017 – the latest body of work will likely strike longtime observers of the artist’s career as a return to earth. Four landscape paintings and six still life paintings feel timeless and reassuring, even as a certain sense of the transcendent or mystical winks at passersby. The exhibition is rounded out by another seven compositions more typical of the artist’s recent interest in entangled symbolic narratives. There should be something for everyone.
Rhythmic and shapely, landscapes featuring familiar iconography like Sycamore Grove, Sycamores, and Another Season may call to mind early twentieth century Modernist painters like Franz Marc or Arthur Dove, but they are firmly rooted in the experience of Southern California today. A trio of cacti blooming in the moonlight then takes the viewer to the Southwest. A rousing pair of easel-sized still life paintings called Wild Rhubarb (above) and Poppies and Lupine complete the complement of stylish moderne still life.
Those who remember Perko’s last four exhibitions with the gallery will find that the artist’s interest in weaving together disparate historical and mythological stories has not abated. Like a poet, she tries to ignite the imagination with resonant images. A touch of dark humor sometimes abides as well. In The Sparrows Could Not Be Defeated, for example, a pepper tree dripping with white morning-glories is full of sparrows. The tree grows out of an ancient nautilus shell. Offshore, a sailing ship (a galleon perhaps?) is anchored with an island in the distance. Everything changes, but if the sparrows decide it’s home, they stay.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Angela Perko has been represented by Sullivan Goss since 2005. Although she took plein air painting lessons from Michael Drury and continues to do figurative drawing in a classroom setting, she is essentially self-taught. She and her husband own the Lost Horizon bookstore in Montecito, where she is exposed to an almost endless stream of ideas for her work. This is her eighth exhibition with the gallery. Two significant catalogs have been published on the artist, one in 2013 and the more recent one in 2022.
