PRESS RELEASE
Barry Ratoff
9 January – 6 February 1998
Artist reception: Friday, 9 January, 6 to 8 pm
Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present the work of Barry Ratoff, a New York based artist showing for the first time in San Francisco. In this exhibition, Ratoff uses drawing, collage and photography as a means of expressing both the personal and universal. The formal characteristics - simplistic and organic forms, pure color, repetitive imagery all serve to represent that which is elemental and essential in the world. Ratoff forgoes the frivolous for the fundamental both in his examination of nature and his time-consuming method of drawing.
Splitting his time between New York city and upstate New York, Ratoff has made this work in a somewhat confined environment. Both a city studio and a cabin in the woods has become a place for an obsessive exploration of his immediate surroundings and also his own past. Subtly conceptual in its documentation of time and minimal in its use of repetition, the work references art history but speaks to the present. This intimate and delicate work evades conventional categorization.