33 Bond Gallery is proud to start the new year with a collection of new paintings by New York based artist Adela Leibowitz, on view at the gallery through February 2009. With her new series Leibowitz takes the viewer on a voyeuristic journey somewhere between The Shining and Alice in Wonderland. The work focuses on the female psyche and draws its’ imagery from romantic 19th century literature scenery as well as vintage horror movies. The vignettes presented in the paintings depict at times rich and dramatically opulent interiors and at others simple denuded outdoor settings.

Whether in socially enticing and oppressive interiors or free and seemingly more pure outdoor environments, the characters (exclusively women) all seem involved in role-playing. Occasionally blindfolded, masked, or nude, the women reenact childhood games, violent or sexual acts, cultural rituals, or tales of morality.

Influenced by Jung and Freud’s theories, Leibowitz plays with women’s counteracting primitive and developed, socially conscious instincts. Each painting contains a certain polarity, highlighting paradoxical elements – repulsion and beauty, fear and comfort, children and violence, etc- delivering complex psychological dramas.

In this exhibition “the artist covers new ground, introducing experiments with dimension and scale, working smaller than she ever has before, which allows her to focus upon the actions of her characters as much as the settings and details which surround them. [...]Taken on first glance, we are greeted with a world of fantastic happenstance and narrative in these paintings, divorced from the mean and the mundane. Leibowitz has the innate ability to connect with degrees of metaphor, which have not been typically allowed into the interactions of daily life, which are usually buried under academic models of psychology or sociology, or repressed in such quarters for being essentially metaphysical or perverse. Her images invade the real while they accrue meaning, giving us due access to both the language of artistic influence, and language of female reflection, and a profound link to the sources of consciousness. ” (David Gibson)