Art on the Avenue 3830 Lancaster Ave Philadelphia, PA 19104 September 4 – October 5, 2015

Art on the Avenue Gallery is privileged to introduce to the American public the Italian-Romanian artist, DOINA BOTEZ, a talented and complex artist who has lived, worked, and successfully exhibited in Italy since 1989. While this exhibit is her first in the United States, it is the 31st in a series of successful solo shows in Italy, Romania and other European cities, We hope that the works chosen for the show will provide a small, yet representative, sample of the art of this prolific outstanding artist, whose paintings and drawings mostly employ mixed techniques on paper. In 2013, the publishing house, Skira, one of the most famous publishers of art books, issued the monography album ”Ill Corpo dell’ Imagine”, featuring Doina Botez’s works between 1989 and 2013, under the care of well known art historian and critic, Professor Flaminio Gualdoni. Among the numerous solo shows, we mention the one at National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in San Marino, the ”Nosce te Ipsum”show at the Castle Sant’Angelo National Museum in Rome, the ”Alchemical Affinities” exhibit in Bucharest, Romania.

With affinities for and roots in the neo-expressionistic movement of the early 1980s, the artist takes us on a painterly excursion into the mythical past, employing mythological, at times grotesque, figurative imagery and returns us to ponder the poetical, allegorical and methaporical relevance of the images for our presend day human condition. At times the coagulated images disperse in an informal, fluid gestural movement or show surprising materiality; at other times images appear indefinite, as if in a dream. One theme that underlies most of the artist’s work is transformation, ”methamorphosis”, inspired by the Latin poet Ovid’s work.

She paints ”forms changed into new entities” and employs the motive of methamorphosis for analytic and introspective purposes, in the context of contemporary life and its anxieties. Elegant and sensuous, at times erotic, Doina Botez’s painting, with its amazingly rich and subtle range of color, invites the viewer to dream with her, while stirring the depths of the soul. Doina Botez’s art has been the subject of major critical and curatorial attention, and her works are in museums and private collections in Italy, the Republic of San Marino, the Vatican, Romania, France, Great Britain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and USA.