Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
Tiger Tiger is the current summer group exhibition at Salon 94 Bowery, on view through August 21, 2015.  The fittingly titled show brings together fifteen artists, whose works explore the ease of tropical landscapes, and the seemingly perfect equilibrium of wild life. Works boasting ample color spectrums speak to simple yet ecstatic rhythms of island life, while elsewhere a distinctive composition of flush tropical wilderness wins out.  Distinctively foreign to New Yorkers, elements from these tropical destinations blossom into depictions of dazzling animals, plants or landscapes, contrasting the city’s heavily industrialized and overpopulated dynamic just outside the gallery space.
Michael Assiff, Untitled (Tropical Forest with Monkeys)Â (2013)
On one wall, Nikki Maloof contributes a trio of oil on canvas paintings, each depicting a single figure (tiger, monkey and woman), while focusing on the serenity and balance beneath each being. Tiger in a Yellow Field of Sad Flowers, for example, reflects the glowing coat of a contemplative tiger, while in Looking Back, a nude young woman eloquently stares into eyes of onlookers behind a copse of plants.
Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
Ryan Mrozowski, on the other hand delivers profoundly colored acrylic on linen paintings, depicting freshly ripened oranges, each revealing its beaming colors against the backdrop of the saturated green leaves. Dense and captivating, this series of four paintings, all executed in the exact same dimensions, orchestrate a naturalistic aesthetic that equally calms and animates.
Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
In the Porifera series, Paul Swenbeck’s brightly colored abstract earthenware sculptures, sponges living under the open seas, beckon to onlookers at first sight, with their arduously complex visuals.  Conversely, Karin Gulbran’s small size stone vases, titled California Lion Chasing a Wild Boar and Possible Shark (Small Fishball), pay homage to Grecian urns, displaying simple narratives on their surfaces. Departing from such modestly sized three dimensional works, Yutaka Sone’s Tropical Composition/Traveler’s Palm #1, a life-size sculpture of a palm tree canopy made out of rattan and steel; and Misaki Kawai’s Snake Bench, a wooden bench replicating a curvy snake, diversify the course of the exhibition.
Offering a coolly flush departure from the scorching sun and grey facades of NYC, Tiger Tiger is on view at Salon 94 Bowery through August 21, 2015.
Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
Tiger Tiger at Salon 94 (Installation View)
— O.C. Yerebakan
*All images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed.
Related Link:
Salon 94 [Exhibition Page]
