This exhibition features three artists whose work is characterized by a highly individual approach to both form and content. What unites them is their conviction that imaginatively conceived figuration can be a powerfully expressive force in contemporary painting. They believe, in common, that painting in our time has the potential to engage both the intellect and the visual sense.

With the collapse of the very concept of the avant garde into a heap of over hyped trivialities, it is among such independents as these that the most vigorous painting may be found. Their work is sometimes eccentric, sometimes perverse but often charged with an energy and passion that comes from pursuing an intensely felt inner vision:

Douglas Andersonis a contemporary artist-alchemist. He transforms the detritus of the machine age – pipes, gears, tubes, and the unnamable mechanical bric-a-brac discarded by our civilization into bizarre, humanoid dramas. With an ingenious transposition he has rephrased the world of early 20th century metaphysical painting and created a contemporary equivalent that is both poignant and absurd. He is represented by the Blue Mountain Gallery (bluemountaingallery.org).

Robert Birmelin’s work is rooted in direct observation and a practiced exercise of visual memory. His paintings reflect the experience of being a part of the city crowd. The way in which the scanning eye seeks its path through a busy, confused environment is his repeated subject. Other paintings are meditations on the intimate relationships between men, women and children in the domestic environment. These are reversible, compositions, having no final ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ orientation, being permanently restless to the eye and mind. Robert Birmelin is represented by the Peter Findlay Gallery and the Luise Ross Gallery. For more information see robertbirmelin.com.

Regina Granne’s quietly dramatic paintings are calculated to remind us of the intersection between beauty and tragedy. Precisely observed still life arrangements contain within them scattered scraps of newspaper photographs which refer us back, through the beauty of the painting, to the world of the suffering victims of both natural and man-made disasters. Also shown are the “maps†that wed a sensitive abstraction to a consciousness of world affairs. Regina Granne is currently represented by the A.I.R. Gallery and the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery in Boston. For more information see granne.net