VIEWING ROOM:
VINCENZO MISTRETTA |  TIFFANY TANG

September 8 - October 8

The gallery is delighted to present a two artist exhibition in our viewing room from September 8th to October 8th. The exhibition runs concurrent to Takuji Hamanaka’s solo exhibition. The artists are Tiffany Tang and Vincenzo Mistretta. Tang works in the medium of porcelain, creating sculptures based on the form of the traditional Korean moon jar in which two hemispherical forms are joined in the center. While traditional moon jars are characterized by a simplicity of surface, Tang has reinterpreted the aesthetic, deliberately creating a linear cracking effect in the porcelain and adorning the form with a combination of colors and attachments that resemble flower petals and stars.

Mistretta’s paintings share Tang’s intensive exploration of the surface of an object. While Tang’s sculptural surfaces have an experimental yet restrained feel, Mistretta’s painterly surfaces feel heavily impastoed, with an all-over quality of color and texture that appears wild and untethered. He uses materials such as paint, ink, and resin, to treat the painting as an accretion of materials, calling to mind historic artists such as Burri and Fautrier. Mistretta’s colors appear to intertwine, swirl, and melt onto and over each other. The artist has titled this series, ‘Sfantumata,’ a mutable Sicilian word heard in the artist’s community of Aspra that means ‘weathered’ or ‘cracked.’

Tiffany Tang received a BA in Art from San Francisco State University in 2015 and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA, where she is the Studio Manager of Wheelhouse Clay. Vincenzo Mistretta received a BFA in painting from the Pratt Institute in 1989 and an MFA in media studies from SUNY Buffalo in 2005. He is an Associate Professor of Film Production at the University of Southern Mississippi in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where he currently resides.