Due Solo Exhibition of Gan Yu & Jim Peters | The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature | Open June 4 and close Aug 28, 2022
Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KUBE Art Center, Beacon, New York

Gan Yu and Jim Peters Duo-Solo Exhibition

Ethan Cohen Gallery Duo Exhibition

Gan Yu & Jim Peters | The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature , Open June 4 and close August 28, 2022
Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center, 211 Fishkill Avenue, Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature, a dual exhibition showcasing the works of Gan Yu and Jim Peters, both of whom have created an extensive body of work observing the nude body. While the artists share a common subject matter, Yu and Peters' approach differ substantially.

Jim Peters creates intimate and sensual paintings of nude figures in darkened interiors. He often depicts a female form, almost always his wife, presented in clutter-strewn rooms with weary beds and peeling wall paint. At times, there are photographs or other constructions blended into his paintings. Sometimes, the scene is not on canvas but in boxy diorama-like construction assemblages composed of wood, paint, and other found materials - creating a small stage, a window through which viewers can experience the sensuality of Peters' vision. Peters paints completely from memory - they are all paintings that are a product of his mind, the remnants of his experience, a remembrance of a mid-day moment, an argument, an embrace, a conversation, throes of passion. The free-floating moments salvaged from consciousness also inform the process of painting itself for the artist - one can observe the spontaneous layering of the paint, raw and without pretension, onto the canvas. Peters frequently uses thick dark oils to create a raw depiction of his physical reality. The result is a tactile, immediate, sensual, often erotic depiction of daily musings of the artist's life, his routine life, his love life, and his creative life, all of which are hand in hand. Jim Peters' work has always been about space, the reaction of people - his figures - to that space. He desires the intimacy, perhaps even the claustrophobia that places a tension on the narrative in his paintings. Peters states that for him, darkened interiors are both magical and mysterious; they compress the sensuality, and heighten the risks and pleasures of relationship. Jim Peters has been teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 2007.

Gan Yu also creates sensual, tactile nudes set against a dark backdrop, but his method is substantially different. He creates statuesque and dense nude bodies on handmade black Chinese paper, a sensitive field that is textured to suggest a three- dimensional quality. Gan Yu states that these works are an expression of classical aestheticism with a contemporary depiction. his figures do, in fact, look like fragmented nude sculptures of the past, whilst uniquely being placed on delicate, textural handmade paper, meant for ink. Gan Yu is well known as a painter - especially as an ink painter - and all of his paintings are about the confluence of painting techniques of East and West. A New York- based artist, curator, and professor at The Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Gan Yu takes a special interest in investigating the east/west polarities of art from antiquity to the present. He occupies this zone of contrast and commonality, forging new forms of image making, blending both artistic traditions. Gan Yu's works on view do use mix media techniques and materials from around the globe, and the expression of the nude is realized masterfully. These works, much like Jim Peters' in the show, are about the ordinary elevated to a realm of the ethereal, through Gan Yu's strong use of line and grasp of form. The focus gravitates around the natural, the ordinary, the human body. It's a subject sphere that both allow the artist to observe and honor the mundane, the daily life of human existence. At the same time, we are aware of a simultaneous exploration, that of the mimetic process itself, of observing and depicting reality (Article quoted from Ethan Cohen Gallery).

Paintings by Gan Yu

Gan Yu & Jim Peters | The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature , Open June 4 and close August 28, 2022

Opening Ceremony:
June 4th - 5th
11:30 am - 6:00 pm

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center, 211 Fishkill Avenue, Beacon, NY

Opening Ceremony:
June 4th - 5th
11:30 am - 6:00 pm

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center, 211 Fishkill Avenue, Beacon, NY

"Nude Body" series, ink and mixed-media on paper by Gan Yu, 2021-2022

Dialogue between Gan Yu and Jim Peters

Gan Yu: Matisse described his aim as an artist: to discover the essential character of things beneath their natural appearance. What is your main purpose of painting and what can you see from the superficial appearances of subject you will paint or draw every day?

Jim Peters: I paint to express my feelings, passions, and especially to fulfill my need to make/create something, a physical object. For me, painting is a “platform” on which I can consummate the need to use my hands and my mind together, the physical and the visual. My work/paintings are often about a personal space, an intimate, sensual, even claustrophobic space, a space with the tension of intimacy, of cohabitation, of the acting out of love – a nest, a safe house for vulnerability, craziness, play, creation.

Gan Yu: The human bodies in your paintings are always in a dim, box-like interior. Does this resemble a spiritual or paradisiac moment of life, or just a natural moment for living?

Jim Peters: The nests are simple, bare, no-frills, the material world is excluded. The lovers only are the necessity. A mattress, a floor, a wall, a window, a place for sharing -- throw in a book, a coffee, poems, touch, receive, give. All my work is somehow about this desire, this companionship. I paint what I want, I paint what I dream, I paint what I need.

Gan Yu: Your paintings and drawings have an inner voice natural to people. What is the true sentiment of your inner voice sent from your artworks such as the female figures?

Jim Peters: My favorite painter is Pierre Bonnard. I don’t paint like him, but we have two strong commonalities. We both paint our lover, our partner, and we paint them not from life or photographs; we draw, erase, paint, scrape our partner from our memory, our conjugal conscious and subconscious mind. I change, destroy, recreate my figures. The work is not about portraiture, but about actual feelings and experiences, these may change, day to day, and so do the paintings.

Gan Yu: From your bio, I noticed that you got an MA in Nuclear Physics from MIT, so I am wondering if there is a natural connection between physics and painting.

Jim Peters: I love particle physics, atomic and nuclear. I have forgotten half of the facts I knew when I was at the Naval Academy and MIT in the 60’s. But what I learned from physics and have used in my fifty years of painting is that science/physics is never completed, never stagnant; and the iteration of an idea leads to a new idea. You do not have to be always correct or totally positive in physics. Knowledge comes from failure, a failed experiment. Einstein could not totally believe in quantum physics because he realized through calculations that quantum physics would require wave/particles at certain times to respond to each other, message each other, in a time faster than the speed of light, which was at that time the speed limit of the known universe. Then “Entanglement”—our modern measuring techniques have now proven that indeed this messaging at a speed faster than the speed of light does happen. But it was Einstein’s postulations that brought about the experimentation that formalized/verified this significant discovery.
Thusly atomic and nuclear physics have made me think about iteration, the opportunity of failure, to try again. The realization that all my work with internally converted electrons and neutron cross sections/collision densities could only be interpreted through experimental equipment/detectors. I could not actually see any of the actions I was recording/measuring – it was all in my mind, similar to my desire and decision to paint from my mind’s eye versus an actual model/figure/space.

Gan Yu: From your works, I can see a wider context of contemporary culture. Do you have a mission or a message to the viewers when you plan to do your paintings?

Jim Peters: To me, art is like that. I cherish not the actual landscape, or figure; what I cherish is how an artist interprets that vision she or he sees. I enjoy the paintings of nature more than nature itself. I want to see what how Bonnard, Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Utamora, Marlene Dumas et al respond to/represent real environments/bodies, to see their “reality.” This is of course somewhat ingenuous, because we need the real landscape, the real person, to influence and possess us, in order to paint/create.

Gan Yu: What is the most important thing you want to express when you teach students drawing at RISD?

Jim Peters: I teach at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I work primarily with first year students in the course Foundation Drawing. Each drawing class meets one day a week for 8.5 hours.

My primary goal is to get the students to engage, to invest, in the adventure of making images, (representational, or non representational), and to pursue this investigation in multiple methods/processes. I tell my students that they are not here to impress me—they are here to explore and push, expand their drawing/visual art boundaries, to experiment, which invariably means confronting risk and that failure is a necessary component of risk. We want to absorb the idea that process is as important as product. Our goal is to create and develop an active imagination and to practice/hone the tools and skills to implement that imagination.

I want to give my students the excitement, the journey, and hopefully, the passion of making things, designing things—to use drawing as a method to record and analyze the world around us.
I have a broad interpretation of what drawing is. As a class we draw from nature, the model, make monotypes and drypoints, plan and design architectural projects at locations of their choosing, in Providence, create continuous drawing animations a la William Kentridge, paint with ink life size drawings from the model, and of course we work with the concepts of line, mass, tonality, the different methods to imply space (perspective, placement on page, scale shifts, etc.). We look at the works from different cultures to analyze how they use these same tools to create their unique life images and representations.

Due Solo Exhibition of Gan Yu & Jim Peters | The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature | Open June 4 and close Aug 28, 2022 Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KUBE Art Center, Beacon, New York

Due Solo Exhibition of Gan Yu & Jim Peters | The Human Body: Dialogue with Nature | Open June 4 and close Aug 28, 2022
Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KUBE Art Center, Beacon, New York