Saturday, January 21, 2023, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Amy Simon Fine Art
123 Post Rd E
Westport, CT 06880
Amy Simon Fine Art is pleased to open this two-person exhibition featuring work by two highly accomplished artists whose work deals with surface interest and exploration.
Donald Martiny’s signature work is composed of dispersed pigment on aluminum. He creates immediately frozen brushstrokes that are made from his own movements. They are defined by the physicality of his body. Moving is an expression, just as is the color. The paintings are actual authentic gestures. Once completed, they look like relief on the wall. He recently was commissioned to create the design sets for The Paul Taylor Dance Company. He was selected to create the sets for “Somewhere in the Middle,” choreographed by Amy Hall-Garner.
Stuart Disston is a highly accomplished architect, and senior principal in the firm Austin, Patterson, Disston. His many projects often kept him away from pursuing his passion for making art. With the onset of Covid, he created an art studio and started work on ideas about fragility, temporality, and the ability to endure.
The monarch butterfly is the inspiration for Disston. It travels thousands of miles on its life journey. When it finally arrives at its destination its wings are torn and tattered – a beautiful symbol of endurance and fragility. Such is life. Butterflies are featured in much of Disston’s work. In this series, he attempts to explore the notion of a delicate, worn, and disheveled beauty that is subtly embedded in nature. Upon closer inspection, its quiet, resilient power is revealed.
Many of the surfaces in Stuart Disston’s work are incised, ripped, torn, or otherwise distressed. In others, he cuts with surgical precision. The heat releases the flow of pigment from underneath the gray-tone “skin” of the top layer in each work, exposing saturated color from one of the many layers beneath.