Bespoke Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition of new work by Christina Hejtmanek, Between Promise and Loss . A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery on Thursday, October 18th from 6 to 8 p.m.

In her second solo exhibition with the gallery Hejtmanek continues her exploration of the complex relationship between time, space and personal memory, specifically focusing on fleeting moments that are seemingly light yet actually weighted and imbued with significance. The subject of these new large-scale photographs is fireworks in the night sky. Measuring 40×60”, the prints are dramatic renditions that technically explore both classic and contemporary concerns.

Whereas Hejtmanek’s previous landscape-based work used a painterly vocabulary, these new works delve into an exciting realm of mark-making using photography to create large scale ‘drawings’. Working with the inherent dialectic of fireworks, which are both celebratory and also reference and /or commemorate war, these images are as formally layered and complex as they are conceptually challenging. Hejtmanek’s work engages memory and nostalgia, and questions our relationship to particular universal experiences without making didactic statements about what that experience should mean.

In her essay “Present in the Past”, writer lê thi diem thúy states of Hejtmanek’s work:

“What these images reveal is not a place, so much as a moment, or a constellation of moments, each forever fleeting…To look at them is to be drawn toward the essence of experience itself: all that hovers within, invisible and wordless. “

Technically Hejtmanek begins with a classical approach using film and, in this case, a 35 mm camera. With a keen sense of color, light, and composition, the artist works within the traditional history of photography, while breaking from tradition by using long exposures and other techniques to push her medium to create subtle abstractions that reference drawing and painting. The resulting photographs exhibit surfaces like paintings and lines like drawings. Interestingly for a photographer, her work has been compared to artists such as Vija Celmins, Gerhard Richter and Cy Twombly.

Hejtmanek’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues including: W52 Gallery (Dinaburg Arts LLC), NY, NY, CEPA Gallery Buffalo, NY, Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY, NY. Her work is included in many private collections and in the collection of Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM. Hejtmanek’s photographs have been featured in publications such as “K-48” (Volumes 2 and 5) and “Catholic”, 2003. She was a Visiting Artist at Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX. Hejtmanek lives and works in New York City and Marfa Tx.

A survey catalogue entitled Almost, with an essay by lê thi diem thúy, has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Between Promise and Loss. The catalogue will be available at the gallery.