All that Remains shows Los Angeles-based artist Bobbie Moline-Kramer breaking new ground in an exhibition of paintings, three-dimensional work, and installation. Moline-Kramer has long been admired for her hyper-realistic drawings and absorbing portraits of intense emotion, as seen in the 2008 contemporary portrait show, "About Face" at the Long Beach Museum of Art. She now takes a bold departure in both medium and theme in a new body of work to be shown for the first time at Left Coast Galleries in Studio City from March 18 - April 20, 2010. The exhibit includes powerful, expressionistic mixed-media paintings on paper, sculptural artifacts constructed of delicate bird bones, and a symbolic family tree installation, where the intricately rendered branches are not only painted, but burned and carved into the wooden panels.
The crow, along with other birds, appears as a subject throughout the series in varying degrees of abstraction, anthropomorphism, and entropy. Artist Moline-Kramer writes, "The work is narrative and symbolic. It is about conflict, about wanting to belong, wanting to fit-in, wanting to be part of a whole even as that whole fragments into individual units. It's about a family tree, but a family tree whose parts are no longer connected with each other; a family tree that has begun to disintegrate." And as the tree fragments, symbols from the past connect the individual birds into a family that comes alive.
For those unfamiliar with Moline Kramer's earlier work, as well as for those familiar with her 25-year dedication to realism, the exhibition is rewarding in both its' expression and execution. It is work born of a lifelong skill in observation and rendering, and of a quest for the intrinsic, undeniable power that abides in the human soul. Mysterious in its narrative, virtuosic in its execution, and penetrating in its subject matter, All that Remains is an exhibition not to be missed.
Moline Kramer's exhibition All That Remains runs from March 18 - April 20, 2010.