another year in LA


"Patrick Collins:Back Fence"  - Curated by Shana Nys Dambrot

Shana Nys Dambrot is a Los Angeles based art critic, is Managing Editor for Flavorpill LA & Contributing Editor for Artkrush.com and writes for Modern Painters Magazine and Artweek among others.

Ms. Dambrot curated, "Patrick Collins:Back Fence" the first exhibition of 2006 at ANOTHER YEAR IN LA, February 10 - March 3.

Read her curator's statement below.


New York painter Patrick Collins splits his time between the city and a studio in Rincon, Puerto Rico; and it is easy to imagine how the luxuriously warm, surreally saturated color of the air and earth in a place like that has informed his palette, but that is far from the whole story. His interest in dynamic colors and rich texture most often finds expression in urban forms or pure abstraction, so that the canvases retain the sensual physicality and dense atmosphere of a tropical landscape, even as they either recontextualize forms and objects from, as in the “Back Fence” paintings, café tables and brasseries, or eschew the forms of realism altogether. In either case, the true subject of the paintings is the movement employed in their rendering. Collins’ brushwork is lively and thick, with a variegated surface and a woven network of marks that keeps the eye in perpetual motion. A painted desert made of half-empty wine glasses and construction cranes visible from a café patio; a lily-covered fish pond curving skyward to meet an afternoon full moon; a waitress’s red hair caressing a polished tile floor; a loosely cohesive network of energetic brushstrokes; a color from last night’s dream. From fleshy mauves to veined ochres, shimmering blues and resplendent greens, Collins flirts with a natural palette but makes no attempt at naturalism in shape or perspective, with the resulting visual cavalcade settling into a balance that is kinetic but never frenetic, harmonious but far from simple, pure but not naïve.

Shana Nys Dambrot

Los Angeles, 2005


another year in LA is located at 2121 N. San Fernando Road, #13, Los Angeles, CA 90065

Gallery phone:  323-223-4000