Reception: Personal Interiors Recent work by Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin
September 3, 2010 (7:00 PM - 9:00 PM)
Location: SoFA Gallery

Personal Interiors: Recent Work by Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin is a traveling exhibition consisting of paintings, drawing, and collages that explore the relationships of figures in intimate settings to the process of painting. Feltus notes “ These paintings are about many things and at the same time about nothing more than painting itself.” In discussing her process Irwin says “I paint the paintings to have an aura of quiet ---the surface is relatively smooth, brush strokes minimized, color relationships and range are not violent or active. But I do not wish the paintings themselves to be silent.” The exhibition will also include Feltus and Feltus: photographic and video works by their sons, Tobias and Joseph Feltus.

“For a quarter-century Lani Irwin has been painting mysterious interiors populated by mannequins, puppets, toys and human figures. While her dolls are reminiscent of the lay figures Giorgio de Chirico deploys, her hushed tableaux may suggest the domestic enigmas of Balthus.” - Gail Leggio, American Arts Quarterly, 2001 Vol. XVIII, No.2
“The constants in the work of Alan feltus are so inexorable, so unyielding, that any encounter with his paintings returns us to the things that characterize and comprise the strange other worldliness and timeless solemnity of their presence: states of stillness, silence, suspension, intense solitariness, interiority, absorption.”- Teana Newman 
Catalogue Essay: "Reflections on the Work of Alan Feltus,
Forum Gallery 2005

Alan Feltus received his MFA from Yale and was the recipient of several awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2005). Both he and Lani have exhibited in New York, Washington D.C., and numerous other venues. Irwin received her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (1995). Alan Feltus and Lani Irwin were the 2009-2010 resident visiting artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Alan and Lani live and work in the countryside of Assisi, Italy. For more information about the artists please visit www.alanfeltus.com and www.laniirwin.com