Peter Foucault

Peter Foucault presents at OFF Space Proliferations (part 2).

Public Storage, 2490 Marin St. San Francisco, CA

Exhibition: Friday March 12th through Thursday March 26th, 2010

Artist Reception Friday March 12th, 7:30 to 9:30pm.

From Wealth to Stealth

OFF Space, an artist-run curatorial collective, brings contemporary works uptown to swanky wealth management offices in the financial district and into the ‘hood, behind the roll up door of a Public Storage unit in Bay View Hunter’s Point with Proliferations.

True to its nomadic nature OFF Space mounts exhibitions in a variety of locations.

Proliferations, a two-site show premiered at the wealth management offices of Rhodes & Fletcher on Dec. 3^rd and runs through March 4. In contrast, Part 2 will be presented on the sly to escorted groups in a Public Storage unit on the evening of March 12 and then by appointment through March 27.

Artists Alicia Escott, Peter Foucault, Eric Gangsei, Michael Ryan, Justin Hoover and Alexis Arnold will present various artworks.

Peter Foucault sets up mechanical systems through which viewers and robots interact to produce densely layered graphite drawings of repetitive and random marks. Sculptor and video artist David Stein presents a unique look at media and culture with his totem-pole video exploration of popular print media.

To learn more about OFF Space visit off-space.org.

Nicole Schmoelzer

Nicole Schmölzer (born 1968, Switzerland) is a painter's painter. Introduced to painting at an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88), she continued to the Paris branch of Martenot in 1988-89, teaching art during the following 10 years to students of various ages. Schmölzer furthered her education with studies in art science, literature and linguistics at universities in Basel and Geneva, concluding with her thesis on Josef Albers’ interaction of color. Her wide interest in fine art ranges from personal expression to the social and historical, as well as to philosophical and economical meaning. She completed her postgraduate program on Cultural Studies in Berlin and Basel (1998, 2003-04) by publishing a research paper on corporate-related art awards.

Since 1995, Schmölzer has worked regularly with galleries representing her work in Europe and the United States. She received grants from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, and Villa Montalvo in California.

Schmölzer's painting focuses on the substantive properties as well as the interactive capacities of color. Her intention is to challenge the limits of color. As she generates greater subtleties in behavior and movement of the medium, the fluidity of the paint becomes structural. She uses terms such as “modeling” and “pushing the color back” to describe her processes of application, spreading, reduction and abrasion of pigment into and off the primed surface. Choosing oil paint for its luminosity, she studies how the layers of colors emit transcendence in their relationship to the shifting planes of dimension. Schmölzer travels these spatial relationships with her innate ability to translate the boundaries between interior dialogue and imposed definition, between organic experience and applied order.

A complete portfolio of her current exhibition may be downloaded here.