Artist shows in airport

Art Business News, Sept, 2005

ATLANTA -- Artist Deanna Sirlin, represented by New York's Luxe Gallery, will exhibit 15 of her latest large-scale multimedia drawings in, "It's All in My Head," in the atrium of the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Sirlin digitally sampled passages from her own scanned oil paintings, printed the resulting images on canvas and then finished the pieces by painting and drawing over the scanned image to produce innovative hybrid works.

"I see myself as carving out a new image from the existing one," she says. "When I add new colors and images, I'm playing with my own earlier ideas--I'm dancing around them."

The abstract, vertical drawings in this series are scaled to human proportions--6 x 2 feet--and feature the lively, rounded shapes and colors characteristic of Sirlin's work. Bright colors and upward movement from the bubble-like forms evoke optimism in each piece.

Sirlin says, "The images in these new drawings are in my head, they are also in my body. I see the forms as I [create] them; my hand and eye work together as one. It is the physical experience of painting that is articulated in the drawings. The circles are planets, molecules, bubbles, eyes and mouths that revolve around one another. The color is what I feel radiating out from inside. I want everyone who looks at these to understand that they are my secrets."

Larson-Juhl, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of custom picture-framing moulding, is the corporate sponsor for the airport exhibition. The frames were specially designed to make the colors more vibrant and are reminiscent of those used by one of Sirlin's artistic heroes, the modern Italian painter, Giorgio Marandi.

"Larson-Juhl began collecting Deanna's artwork years ago, so we are thrilled to know that so many people will enjoy her work through this exhibit," says Steve McKenzie, CEO of Larson-Juhl.

Sirlin's work is in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia; the Universita Ca' Foscari, Venezia, Italy; Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany; and the Shenzhen Institute of Fine Arts, China.

For more information, call 770-475-4960; visit www.deannasirlin.com or www.larsonjuhl.com.