LOS ANGELES, CALIF.- Patricia Sweetow Gallery presents its second exhibition in Los Angeles, "Absurd Petunias", featuring Joachim Bandau from Germany, Cornelia Schulz from the San Francisco / Bay Area, Monica Rezman from Chicago, and Elisa D'Arrigo from New York. The title comes from an essay written by Kenneth Baker (1946–2021), author and resident art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle for 30 years. Baker mused about the trappings of abstraction on levels of relevancy in the face of loss and degradation. He found hopeful reasons to rest in the presence of the unknowable, "... abstract paintings offer us their considered stillness, serving as markers enabling us to feel inwardly the stirrings of our own agency and language as respondents, against the background of a manically kinetic culture."

PSG had its first exhibition with Joachim Bandau in 2000, presenting his Black Watercolors. Already known for his early sculpture and drawings, Bandau began painting watercolors in the late 1970’s, with his first museum exhibition in 1983. The Black watercolors became the distilled discourse of his political, aesthetic and spiritual discourse over the past 50-years.




Bandau lives and works in Germany. Recent and current exhibitions include La Biennale de Lyon, France; along with his recently closed solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. Bandau is represented in over 45 museum collections including the Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum Nürnberg; Jewish Museum Berlin; Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen; Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen; and the Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, with over 20 public installations throughout Europe.

Elisa D’Arrigo’s process is one of excavation and discovery — improvisation reveals forms that are oddly familiar, attached to distant memories, or tied to an intrinsic humor. D’Arrigo was born and raised in the Bronx and lives and works in New York, NY. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Everson Museum of Art, The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include, Shapes From Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection. Her work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection. D’Arrigo’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The New York Times, Art in America, Artnews, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Review, Art Papers, Art Spiel, Too Much Art and The New York Observer, among others.

Monica Rezman’s approach to her studio practice is influenced by the skills she learned while working in fashion. Cutting pattern, sewing raw edges, her sculpture and paintings are a collage of colored, patterned shapes and stitched abstract forms stacked upon fields of cut canvas, or in towering soft 3D forms as floor sculpture. In 1999 and 2002 consecutively, Rezman was awarded an Art-in-Residence in Gujarat, India, one of the world’s most revered craft communities in textiles. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at The Riverside Arts Center, 2019; Governors State University Visual Arts Gallery, 2019; Merida English Library, Mexico, 2019; the Chicago Cultural Center, 2017; and The Contemporary Art Gallery, India, 1999. In 2017-18 she was the Artist-In-Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition’s Field/Work program.

Cornelia Schulz has evolved a contemporary synthesis of Abstract Expressionist painting, such as the likes of her San Francisco Bay Area contemporaries, Jay DeFeo and early Joan Brown. Her masterful manipulation of paint, yielding to the subtly shaped support, is an incessant call and response forming high and flat passages, a testament to her vision, skills and willingness to risk failure and loss. PSG had our first exhibition for Cornelia Schulz in 1998. Her early education in the arts began at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in 1954 through 1957, the heyday of the California Ceramics Revolution. She studied sculpture in clay and wood with Renzo Fenci (1914 – 1999), and drawing from Herbert Jepson (1908 –1993). She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting (1959) and her Master of Fine Arts in welded steel sculpture (1961) from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Schulz became the first woman Chair of the University of California Department of Art from 1998 to 1992, she retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002 after 34 years.