MILA LIBMAN

Changing Landscape


September 1 - October 1, 2016

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 8th 5:30 - 7:30pm
 

K. Imperial Fine Art is pleased to present Changing Landscape, its second solo exhibition of the work of Mila Libman.  Changing Landscape will showcase new works on paper devoted to the exploration of landscape as both abstraction and representation.  Photorealistic from a distance, their large-scale allows the viewer to be immersed in the abstraction of natural patterns upon close inspection. It’s these patterns found in nature that are the inspiration for this new body of work.

Libman begins her process by taking photographs in the Sierras, and then alters and distorts the photographs until she arrives at the images that she wants to recreate in her drawings, ultimately allowing the drawing process to take its own form of representation.
 
My ultimate goal is to arrive at the place when the drawing leaves me with a sense of wonder, the same feeling that I have when I take photographs of nature in the first place. I’m not trying to imitate reality, but to create reality from within. – Mila Libman
 
Libman creates her works using a subtractive process.  Evolving her medium from pastels and charcoal, most of these new drawings are made with dry pigments rubbed over large sheets of paper and then a pattern is erased into it, lifting the pigment and revealing the paper to create a pattern of light.

Mila Libman was born in Minsk, Belarus and immigrated to the US in 1988.  She studied graphic design at Montclair State University and continued her art training at the New York Studio School.  In 1993 she was awarded The Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship.  She received her MFA in 1997 from Yale University.  Mila’s work has been exhibited at various venues in the Bay Area, including Berkeley Art Center, SJICA, Art Ark Gallery, 01 San Jose Biennial, Red Ink Gallery and Los Altos Museum.  She's also exhibited in New York, Belfast, ME and New Haven, CT. She lives and works in San Jose, CA.
 
Changing Landscape will be on view September 1 – October 1, 2016 with a reception for the artist Thursday, September 8th 5:30 – 7:30pm.