June 2005                                                                            FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Exhibition Dates: 07/16/05 - 09/03/05
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 16, 6-8 p.m.

International Group Show– Bridge: A Connection Between Two Places, Europe East & West
Curated by Henry Klein, Independent Curator

Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to announce a group show curated by Henry Klein, of recent contemporary works by Eastern and Western European Artists entitled “Bridge” . The title for the exhibition is derived from the currency of the new European Economic Union, the Euro. The backside of each Euro denomination features a different bridge unifying two sides of one of Europe 's great rivers. Collectively, these bridges symbolize the Economic union itself.

The inspiration for this exhibition begins with a collaborative project featuring images by the Belgian lithographer, Walter Brems, played off against images by each of the greatest living lithographic artists from the former Czechoslovakia - the Slovak Vladimír Gazovic , and the Czech's Oldrich Kulhánek and Vladimír Suchánek . Two of these collaborations were hand printed by Rudolf Broulim acting as a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe . Born in Czechoslovakia , but printing in Belgium for the last quarter century, he is probably the best lithographic printer in Europe . The other featured artists in this presentation, the Belgians; Enk De Kramer and Ingrid Ledent , the Slovak, Katarína Vavrová , and the Ukrainian, Roman Romanyshyn use a range of saturated reds to underscore their meaning.

In this installation the color red became a unifying force. Vavrová has always worn her heart on her sleeve. She leaves herself open to the pain and joy of being a human being, a woman and a mother. She permits her experience to immerse her psychic being and then re-emerge unalloyed in her paintings and prints. The recipient of the 2003 Grand Prize in the first Thai Art International Exhibition, she traveled to Thailand to receive the award and immediately fell under the thrall of a Thai ethos. When the tsunami struck in Southeast Asia , it rippled through her work like a blood red tide, it was personal.

The reds of De Kramer, Ledent and Romanyshyn may be psychically less charged, but no less spiritually imbued. Native peoples all over the world sometimes refer to red earth pigments as the “blood of the earth.” The iron oxides found in naturally occurring rusts and clays – the red earth colors – are, in fact, what gives blood its red color and what effects the transfer of life giving oxygen to the cells of the body. Rust, symbolically viewed, is the entropic decay of the body of the earth. In Ledent's work, close-up details of wrinkled skin, conjoined with red, sign her and our own inevitable aging. Each of these artists celebrates the unbreakable connection between earth, body and life through the linkage between their color symbolism and imagery.

Sequential abstraction, seasonal transformation, cycles of human activity, progressions of geological time and the movement of the heavens, all clock the unfolding of time. Sometimes in joyous celebration, as in Romanyshyn, and sometimes with irony and great pain, as in Kulhánek, these artists apply physical and temporal scales to chronicle their own life cycles against the inevitable mechanism of the Universe itself.

Professor Henry Klein has curated exhibitions of work from Central and Eastern Europe for the past 16 years. He teaches printmaking and drawing at Los Angeles Valley College .

For further information, or photos please contact Eleana Del Rio @ 310.657.9843