Tyler Art Gallery season opens with ‘Dialogues Across Time’ exhibition
The lifeline renderings of SUNY Oswego art and design professor Juan Perdiguero (like the image pictured) and the abstract work of international curator and cultural organizer Marc Hungerbühler will open the Tyler Art Gallery season when “Dialogues Across Time” opens Sept. 4, which also will feature an evening reception and panel discussion from 5 to 7 p.m. at the gallery.
The work of SUNY Oswego art and design professor Juan Perdiguero and international curator and cultural organizer Marc Hungerbühler will open the Tyler Art Gallery season with “Dialogues Across Time” running Sept. 4 to Oct. 7.
An opening reception and panel discussion, free and open to the public, will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 4, in the gallery. Perdiguero also will offer an artist’s lecture from 2 to 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 16.
Spanning three decades of practice, the exhibition traces each artist's evolution through key works selected to illuminate their individual trajectories and unexpected points of convergence.
Perdiguero's lifelike renderings of figures and animals stand in sharp visual contrast to Hungerbühler's organic abstraction, which resists figure and ground alike. And yet both artists circle the same essential concepts: control and surrender, permanence and impermanence, the tension between what endures and what dissolves.
Their dialogue echoes what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called the” tragic sense of life,” which he defines as the human negotiation between a longing to persist and an awareness that all things change and end.
Viewed together, their work is a sustained meditation on what it means to make something in the face of inevitable dissolution and decay. These artists find meaning not in resolving this conflict but in finding the courage to exist within the tentative state of the unknown. The resulting artworks give material form to a concept that holds sadness and profound beauty.
Hungerbühler also will show a two-channel immersive video installation in the White Box Gallery in Hewitt Hall. This installation will feature some of his well-known works such as “Navajo,” “Stinger,” “Susie Q” and “Civilian Pavilion.”
Perdiguero, who coordinates SUNY Oswego’s drawing program, has earned numerous grants, honors and fellowships and has been invited to international artist residencies, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award in Creative and Scholarly Activities, Fulbright Scholar Grant, SUNY Oswego Presidential Award, Scholarly and Creative Activities Committee grant funding and more.
He has exhibited his work in numerous national and international galleries and museums across the U.S. and Europe and into China.
Hungerbühler is a Swiss-born multimedia artist, curator and cultural organizer whose practice unfolds across installation, photography, moving image and interdisciplinary exhibition-making. Based in New York, his work has long traced the shifting intersections of identity, migration and cultural exchange, often moving between personal narrative and larger geopolitical frameworks.
In 2002, he co-founded the:artist:network in New York and Beijing, an independent platform dedicated to fostering international artistic dialogue. Through this, he has curated more than 40 exhibitions and developed residency programs across the U.S., Switzerland and China.
Starting Sept. 4, Tyler Art Gallery hours are 2 to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The gallery is closed Mondays, holidays, and when classes are not in session.
Classes and groups may arrange after-hours visitation by contacting gallery director Davana Robedee at [email protected].