John Natsoulas Gallery

Exhibition Dates: February 28 - March24, 2007
Opening Reception for Pat Mahony: Saturday, March 3, 2007, 7 - 9 pm
Opening Reception for Kim Frohsin: Saturday, March 10, 2007, 7 - 9 pm

Pat Mahony was born in 1951 and graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art, with Honors, in 1973. Over time her media and subject matter have evolved, but she has maintained her original voice and artistic vision.

Her work hovers between abstraction and representation. Saturated tones, lush abstraction and a brevity of brushstrokes suggest an absence of wasted motion. Her work emphasizes color, composition and drama. Mahony's subject matter ranges from urban scenes and river landscapes, to still lifes and figurative works.

Kim Frohsin Although she did not study directly under the artists of the Bay Area Figurative School, Kim Frohsin's work definitely has attributes associated to the style of that school. She moved to California in 1979, and subsequently received her Bachelor of Art from San Diego State University in 1984 and her Bachelor of Fine Art in 1988 from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. These were her artistically formative years, and so by living in San Francisco and being exposed to masters like Diebenkorn, Park, Oliveira, and Bischoff, Frohsin's work was influenced by theirs. Even before she knew the Diebenkorn name, Frohsin was greatly attracted to his compositional ambiguity and strength of his colors and markings.

In the early 1990's, Frohsin's work started to be categorized as third-generation Bay Area Figurative Style, and she began to exhibit her paintings alongside Diebenkorn's work and other Bay Area masters. Her work today is not directly inspired by the figurative movement since she does more life drawing, however, considering her educational foundation and lifestyle in San Francisco, the Bay Area's Figurative School's influences are invariably there.

Gladys Nilsson, a founding member of the Chicago Hairy Who, studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1958 to 1962. Encouraged by one of her professors, Nilsson pursued watercolors, which later became her medium of choice. Highly stylized with distorted figures and accentuated with brilliant colors, Nilsson's work reflects her interest in playful language-puns and malapropisms-and other incongruities in life. Nilsson currently teaches at SAIC and continues to be active in Chicago's art community.

Nilsson is one of the few artists who uses watercolors and has revolutionized the media to produce many large and small pieces. Her amazing control and handling of watercolors contributed to her early success in the 1960's when she skyrocketed to international fame. Since then, she has had over 200 solo exhibitions, and close to 400 group shows.