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25 Artists Ring In Baker Sponder’s 25th Anniversary

Karen Kedmey
Apr 27, 2015 2:31PM
Reds and Blacks, 2008
Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery
Maquette III Jubilee III C24, 1984
Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery

This spring, Boca Raton’s Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery looks back over 25 years of business with a celebratory exhibition featuring works by the wide-range of artists that they have been championing. Titled “25 Years, 25 Artists,” the exhibition offers visitors a visual romp through sculpture, painting, ceramics, and mixed media works, reflecting the convergence of creativity of all kinds that the gallery has fostered and maintained.

Among the works on view is Reds and Blacks (2008), a screenprint by Donald Sultan. True to its title, the composition is dominated by bright red and inky black, in the form of large, semi-abstract poppy flowers. These flowers cut across the picture plane in a thick, brilliant band, and bunch towards the lower right-hand corner. Recalling the flowers of Andy Warhol and their lush Floridian surroundings alike, they reflect the artist’s longstanding interest in color and form.

Seated Figure II, 1988
Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery
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Also included in the exhibition is an exuberant sculpture by Peter Reginato, titled Dots (1999). Its joyfully tangled form is composed of delicate, undulating lines interconnecting various shapes. These cohere into semi-abstract representations of people, butterflies, and flowers, which appear kinetic, in motion. Color has always been key to this artist’s work, as reflected in the rainbow of hues he employs.

Satisfaction, 2012
Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery
Containers #605, 2012
Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery

Oskar Lakeman is also concerned with color, in this case, in its raw form as containers of paint ready to receive the artist’s brush. His photorealistic acrylic-on-canvas composition, Containers #605 (2012), is among the paintings the gallery has on show. It takes viewers into the artist’s studio, showing one small part of the process of making a completed work. By pulling back the curtain on art-making in this way, it stands in interesting counterpoint to the other works on view, which reveal little of the studios from which they came—but much about the taste and vision of the mother-daughter team of Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery, sure to be celebrating 25 more years of connecting people with art in the decades to come.

Karen Kedmey

25 Years, 25 Artists” is on view at Baker Sponder Gallery | Sponder Gallery, Boca Raton, Mar. 12–May 13, 2015.

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