Anoka Faruqee and Marietta Hoferer Exhibit
A bi-coastal gallery’s San Francisco location kicks off the fall season with optical illusions
San Francisco’s Hosfelt Gallery kicks off the fall season with the reception of two new exhibits,“The Longest Day of the Year” by Anoka Faruqee and “Drawings” by Marietta Hoferer.
Farquee’s show is her third solo exhibit at Hosfelt Gallery featuring a series of her new paintings that she executes freehand with a surprisingly accurate level of precision.
Farquee mixes hundreds of colors that delicately blend together to form airbrush-like illusions, with some paintings having the fused effect of spilled paint. From afar, the paintings may be reminiscent of magic eye optical illusions, but up close viewers can see that the artist hand paints each pixel.
The hand-drawn pixels in her paintings, either tripods or asterisk forms derived from Islamic tile geometry, comes from the artist’s Islamic heritage (she’s Bangladeshi-American). She states, however, that the meaning behind the pixels isn’t cultural but more so a lift from the traditional form of using rulers or compass to create established shapes. On describing her free-hand process she states, “I’m not interested in merely quoting, or ‘describing’ these forms, forever suspending them in their historical moment. I use them in the present tense for what they are and what they can become.”
Farquee’s loosely-planned paintings start with no intended directions as she likes to decide on shapes and curves during the process of painting. The only form of consistency viewers will see is through her repetitive use of handmade pixels that she says represent metaphors for balance between control and accident.
Also featured on exhibit, is “Drawings” by German artist Marietta Hoferer, who is currently based out of NYC. Similar to Farquee’s paintings, Hoferer’s paintings give off an optical illusion affect through varying shades of lighting she creates on her painting’s surfaces. While Hoferer’s paintings are more organized as they are planned with the preconceived structure of precise grids, she still welcomes chance, intuition, and even imperfection to her creative process.
The exhibits will be available to view at Hosfelt Gallery through 16 October 2010. To find out more information on each of the artists, check out their personal sites, here and here. 
