Solo show at Hap Gallery Portland, Oregon, September 1 - October 2
In In the Eye of the Beholder, Tanya Batura presents a group of challenging sculptural works that mine territories of mortality, beauty, and the human psyche. Her perfected surfaces seduce the viewer; her forms embody a deeper consideration of the human
condition. One can see her affinity with Mapplethorpe in her elegantly pristine sculptures with allusions to the abnormalities and pathologies of the human body. Balancing the macabre and absurd with delicacy, her work seduces the viewer. Her interplay of abstraction and realism creates a sense of the uncanny, presenting humanity in all of its repulsive, elegant, uncomfortable, humorous, and frightening states of existence.
For In the Eye of the Beholder, Tanya Batura has included a group of photographs of completed works, works in-process, and sculptural components that use composition, color, and light to control a viewer’s experience of a particular object. In capturing moments that are an “ideal,” the photographs amplify one of the many intended reads of the physical work.