NEW YORK, NY.- Massey Lyuben Gallery presents Daydreaming, a group exhibition featuring works by Federico Infante, Claire Lieberman, Elizabeth Allison, and Georgi Hamalski.

Federico Infante works predominantly in the medium of painting. He received his BFA from Finis Terrae University (Santiago, Chile) in 2002 and graduated in Spring 2013 with his MFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Infante begins his work with an expressive act of covering the canvas with several layers of acrylic paint and then scratches it off. He repeats this process many times. Infante does not plan the images in advance and stays present and detached as possible from the result. In doing this, he is able to express his unconscious mind, the part of him that has not been processed by logic. Infante then reacts to this abstract and expressive atmosphere by searching for the elements that have emerged: possibly in pockets of light, or the foundations of a landscape. In this way, each painting shows him its singular identity.

Through this process, Infante investigates the tension between the subconscious that drives us and the logic with which we understand our everyday lives. Although this is a deeply personal process, the tension and ambiguity of the circumstances that often arise allow this experience to be related by any viewer.

Infante was the recipient of the Uanlane Foundation Scholarship (2012), the Conicyt Scholarship (2009), and the Juan Downey Grant (2004). He has had several successful solo and group exhibitions in Chile and New York. His work is in private collections across the US and internationally, including France, Belgium, Germany and Singapore. Infante was born in Santiago, Chile in 1982 and is currently living and working in New York.

Claire Lieberman is a sculptor and installation artist who combines such materials as marble, Jell-O, and video. Her work explores a range of dichotomies, such as "the sublime and the quirky, desire and danger, indulgence and guilt." Lieberman has had solo shows at Hot Wood Arts, Brooklyn; THE LAB, NYC; Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta; Gebert Contemporary, Scottsdale; PDX, Portland; the Chelsea Art Museum; International Print Center, NYC; Parker’s Box, Brooklyn; Seoul Art Center, Korea; the University of Alaska, Anchorage; Anderson Gallery,

Virginia Commonwealth University; and Contemporary Galleries at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Lieberman’s grenade series is a natural extension of the artist’s interest in children's play and toy guns as source imagery. The image of toy gun is an icon which embodies the conflict between reality and fantasy in the mind of a child - and in American culture in general. A grenade rendered in translucent, white alabaster is luscious and precious. Its shape shifts from a literal representation of a grenade to a fleshy and sensual, disarming form. This generates an range of responses which vibrate between beauty and repulsion.

Elizabeth Allison’s watercolors explore places the artist has gone, or hopes to go. Dense layers of built up pigment and a labyrinth of drips create each painting. By turning a big sheet of paper this way and that, Allison manipulates the drip. She places the painting on the floor to apply broad washes and lets the paint puddle up, creating unexpected watermarks.

Recently, Allison has been inspired by the pulsating landscape of New York City and the surrounding region. These paintings chase the light at dusk or dawn, examine times of transition, and peer at the spaces between things. They aspire her to capture the way the air not only looks, but smells, feels and changes. The large scale of these works is important- the artist invites the viewer to feel as though they can enter into the scene, that it lurks somewhere between reality and dream. Allison, a Chicago native, lives and works in New York.

Georgi Hamalski was born and raised in Bulgaria where he studied fine art. After college, the artist explored many aspects of figurative painting and focused mainly on portraits. Most recently, however, the artist has used vivid abstract painting to explore the idea of color, and the color that surrounds us. Some of his abstract landscapes feel as we are ‘driving through forest with a sports car’, Hamalski says, ‘it is all blurry but rich in color with no beginning and no end’.