Gallery Archive: Fred Fleisher and Peter Bregoli
March 1 - 29, 1997, at McKinney Arts, 526 East 11th Street, New York.
* Images scanned from 35mm slides taken during the 1997 exhibition.
All artworks are © the respective artists, Fred Fleisher and Peter Bregoli.
Press Release
MCKINNEY ARTS is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of recent works by Fred Fleisher and Peter Bregoli. The gallery is located at 526 East 11th Street in the East Village.
The two artists, unknown to each other before this show, have been independently creating works that reflect the lasting psychological effects of childhood memories and experiences.
Fred Fleisher will be showing mixed media "toys" and paintings derived from these and other objects. Mr. Fleisher dissects common children's dolls and toys and reassembles them into new beings which are inherently frightening. The hybrid figures move and shake, as though they are possessed by some distressing fear. The artist also makes paintings that depict these redesigned figures in actual environments. The toys move off the shelf into a painted realm where they enact the fantasies and fears of the children who once owned them in their original state of being.
Peter Bregoli takes the genre of child portraiture and makes paintings that twist the imagery into psychological double portraits. Each child is painted in a realistic manner, but the portrait is interrupted by a second distorted image of the same child which stands in front of the subject. This secondary image creates a tension within the portrait, and its exaggerated distortion intensifies feelings of discomfort. The fact that these paintings hang directly across from Mr. Fleisher's taunting toys places the viewer in the middle of a cause-and-effect relationship between the works.
Review of the exhibition by Annie Herron for Review Art Magazine, March 15, 1997
Fred Fleisher and Peter Bregoli
MCKINNEY ARTS
through March 29, 1997
The very original artists in this two-person show play off each other wonderfully well. Taunting Toys on One Side and Terrified Tots on the Other is the curator's apt unofficial title for this new Gallery's fifth exhibition, according to Owner/Director, Mark McKinney.
The mixed-media "Taunting Toys" are created by painter/sculptor Fred Fleisher, who then makes paintings derived from these and other objects. Fleisher dissects common children's dolls and toys and reassembles them into new beings which are frightening, yet somehow endearing. These hybrid figures are interactive; the viewer sets them to move and shake, as though they are possessed by some distressing fear. Fleisher "fleshes out" the imagery in his personal world by creating anthropomorphic forms out of colored clay which, in rurn, are used a: mock ups from which to create his thematic paintings set in imaginary environments. These bizarre toys seem to move off the shelf into a painted realm where they enact the fantasies and fears of the children who once owned them in their original state of being.
There's something about Fleisher's sensibility that combines the frighteningly zany, low-life, unpredictable Dennis Hopper character in the film Blue Velvet with the pristine innocence of childhood. Fleisher's images are probably just like what he made as a little boy - these images are what boys paint and draw. It's as though Fred Fleisher just grew up and got technically more sophisticated.
With his "Terrified Tots," Peter Bregoli takes the genre of child portraiture and makes paintings that twist the imagery into psychological double portraits. Each "child" is painted in a realistic manner, but the portrait is interrupted by the same image - except grossly distorted - which stands in front of the first subject. This secondary image creates a tension, to say the least, within the portrait, and its weirdly exaggerated distortion intensifies feelings of discomfort. He paints from photographs of children and photographs of dolls from advertisements and catalogues. The secondary images are created by distorting the original photographs with a Xerox machine. These secondary images seem to be alter-egos or dark sides of the subjects - or worse, metaphors for the inherent possibilities in individuals.
— Annie Herron
