PEGGY PREHEIM: DRAWINGS: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present a group of thirty-seven drawings by Peggy Preheim, surveying the artist's work from 1993 to 1997 and covering a range of subject matter from infants and children's toys to animals and art historical references.

Peggy Preheim's newest drawings transform anonymous Victorian photographs into exquisitely rendered reliefs set floating above an opaque void. The haunting presence of young children and wittingly fragmented body parts oscillates within various configurations such as luminous furniture, obscure shadows, delicate auras and geometric planes. As the viewer shifts focus from exacting close-up details to the milky ground, a gaze seems to emanate from behind the whiteness that may cause consciousness to fade or blur. This mysterious sense of Otherness haunts virtually all of Preheim's work. Such power and intensity may be derived from the artist's unconscious projection or identification with the images she appropriates. Thus, she reverses the practices of Pop and Conceptual artists whose strategies of appropriation are designed to deplete the meaning of the image through parody and repetition or to critique the ideology and institutions that contextualize and promote the image. Preheim's total dedication to her vision and her craft - a practical à priori for her work - produces images of such unexpected beauty and danger that they belie the perennial discourse on contemporary art's demise.

This will be Preheim's second solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. She has recently participated in "New Work: Drawings Today" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and "Dead-fit Beauty" at Hunter College, New York.