21 Aug 2013

Michael Ajerman at the Marco Rossi artecontemporanea gallery

MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea gallery in Pietrasanta is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by the American artist Michael Ajerman, represented in Italy by the gallery for the past number of years. An intriguing artist from the international art scene, Ajerman exercises a personal reflection with colours, here represented on both canvas and paper. Indeed, the expressionist component of his painting comes alive through rich brushworks and his use of vibrant colours and light which blend to create somewhat perturbing but yet poetic works. The atmosphere soaked by hypothetical chromes, blends from reds or blues to express the warmth of a sun drenched beach or the darkness of an attic.

Although the characters represented in his works are often people he knows well, he depicts them in an animated but depersonalised manner that incorporates both warmth and confusion to his paintings. Ajerman often depicts similar subjects, for example a woman at a window, but from different view points and with scales of colour that render different effects of light and dark. Sometimes he paints a kind of non conventional still life subject matter with a very distinct hint of typically British humour to them, with coffee percolators, clothes hangers or pumpkins, all with a sort of human feel that allows him to show their flesh without the need to show people.

His more intimate works are those done with watercolours which almost always depict female friends of his. The technique used in these requires more fluid and rapid strokes, the colours are toned down and spread out on the base, giving life to the paintings that allow images and colours to become indistinguishable with the warmth and confusion rendered in these works.

Antonio D'Amico, in his presentation of the catalogue, writes as follows:
Michael Ajerman was born in New York in 1977, studied art in the United States and won the British Institute Royal Academy Award. He now lives and works in London. Exhibitions of his have been held in numerous galleries all over the world since 1999. Outside of his native America and his adopted United Kingdom, Ajerman's works have had huge success in China, with a collective at the Old Ladies House Art Spaces in Macao in 2006 and also in Israel with a personal exhibition of his works named The Good, the Bad and The Ugly in Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv in 2009. In 2010 a personal exhibition of his works named Third Floor, was held in the gallery MARCOROSSI artecontemporanea in Verona and in the Eventinove artecontemporanea gallery in Turin, in the Transition Gallery in London and, between 2010 and early 2011, in the Toomey Tourell Fine Art gallery in San Francisco.