PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
LANDSCAPES BY ILYA LERNER AT THE MATURANGO MUSEUM
March 8 - April 3, 2002
Reception: March 8 from 7 to 9 p.m.
A one-man show of Ilya Lerner’s landscape paintings will open in the Sylvia Winslow Art Gallery of the Maturango Museum on March 8, 2002 with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. The Gallery is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is located at 100 East Las Flores Avenue, Ridgecrest, CA 93555, phone (760) 375-6900. The exhibition continues through April 3, 2002.
Ilya Lerner was born and received most of his art education in Moscow, Russia, where he had his first solo exhibition at the age of seventeen. He emigrated in 1989 and, after living in Italy, New York City, Boston and Houston, has recently settled in the beautiful Binghamton area of upstate New York. Lerner works in oil, concentrating on plain-air landscape paintings.
The artist’s main intention is to convey a mood and an emotional condition invoked by nature, thus avoiding either excessive mechanical naturalism or oversimplification. His work reveals his deep knowledge and understanding of impressionist and realist traditions (both of which are emphasized in Russian art training), his own careful observation of nature and a mastery of the medium of oil painting. Lerner does not separate between landscape and cityscape and has in fact coined the phrase "suburbiascape" to describe the sites he has chosen to paint. He often paints close to his home, where a familiar scene, encountered daily, encourages him to distill a strong painterly motif for his work from his surroundings.
Lerner’s paintings transmit a clear and powerful emotional message. Whether focused on a single element of the landscape, or a combination of trees, water, buildings or human figures, Lerner directly and creatively reflects the dynamic properties of nature in painting in his richly colored, vital body of work.
The Maturango show is Lerner’s fifth solo exhibition in the United States. He has participated in more than thirty juried, and group shows, won several important awards including Cultural Connections Grant from Texas Commission on the Arts and the the Shirl Smithson Memorial Scholarship for G. Nick’s Painting Master Class from Oil Painters of America. Lerner has received artist-in-residence appointments at the Fundacion Valparaiso, Almeria, Spain, the Mill Atelier Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, and at Buffalo River National Park, AR and has taught at Lee College, Baytown, TX. He is currently represented by the Crane Collection Gallery in Wellesley, MA, the Zarks Gallery in Eureka Springs, AR, the M.A. Doran Gallery in Tulsa, OK. His work can be seen on the pioneering art website
www.PaintingsDirect.com. Ilya Lerner’s paintings are in the collections of the National Park Service, the International Museum Of Art in El Paso, TX, as well as in numerous private and corporate collections in USA, Europe, Israel and states of the former USSR.