Quirky, an exhibition of contemporary painting and sculpture curated by Michaël Amy, opens at the Westport Arts Center on Friday, November 9, with an opening reception from 6:30 – 8:30 in the gallery at 51 Riverside Avenue. The show features work by Dennis Hollingsworth, Shirley Kaneda, Jonathan Lasker, John Newman, Paul Henry Ramirez, Heide Trepanier, and Sofi Zezmer.

“We were intrigued and then captivated by Michaël Amy’s concept for this show,” said Eileen Wiseman, executive director of the Westport Arts Center. “Quirky appeals to a wide range of gallery visitors—scholars, artists, school children, casual visitors. The show has an inherent sense of purpose, and also a sense of humor.”

Quirky explores idiosyncrasy, the seemingly accidental twists of color, composition and texture that are found in contemporary abstract painting and sculpture. The works in Quirky playfully mock formalist principals of painting, and crosses the boundaries of decorum and “good taste” through use of vibrant colors and unexpected forms. These lively, eccentric works challenge the status quo, defy categories, and rebel against a culture of conformity.

According to curator Michaël Amy, “Quirkiness has rich antecedents in the history of art. From the eccentricities of Bosch and Bruegel, through the invented biomorphs of Miro and the gentle humor of Klee, to the inimitable drips of Pollock, the idiosyncratic has always held great appeal.”

Tom O’Connor, co-chair of the Westport Arts Center’s visual arts committee, said, “Quirky is a visually engaging and buoyant exhibition that celebrates the idiosyncratic in the face of an increasingly homogenized culture. While each of the artists brings his or her own very particular artistic personality to bear, they all share an acute visual intelligence that reflects a profound engagement with the issues in contemporary art.”

Michaël Amy is a critic, art historian, curator and lecturer, and an associate professor of art History in the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his doctorate and master of arts from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and his BA from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Sun, Art & Antiques, Burlington Magazine, Viator, Apollo, the Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, DITS and CAA.Reviews. His book One to One: Conversation avec Tony Oursler (Brussels, Facteur Humain) appeared in 2006. He is a frequent contributor to Art in America, Sculpture and tema celeste. Amy lives and works in New York City and Rochester.

Dennis Hollingsworth has always made the surface of the canvas a magical and imaginative territory of painterly space and invention. He is engaged in an ongoing exploration of the physicality of paint, while developing an increasingly personal visual language. He creates custom-made tools that allow him to explore attributes of paint that cannot be realized with traditional art supplies. In his practice, paint is thrown, dropped, scraped, smeared on, troweled off, daubed and squished. The result is a subtly controlled chaos of colors and forms that reflects a distinctive vision.

Shirley Kaneda’s work is composed of seemingly disparate elements, held in check by a faultless eye and hand. Hard-edged geometries cavort with squishy biomorphs, and wavy lines play alongside straight bars, all floating in infinite fields. Though filled with contradictions, the works seem just right.

Jonathan Lasker has developed a vocabulary of shapes, colors and gestures that constitute an undeniably personal pictorial language, yet one that is firmly embedded in the history of modern painting. He freely quotes from a broad range of modernist marks, from the minimalist stripe to the abstract expressionist drip. His compositions seem predicated on dramatic visual contrasts: automatic doodles share space with what appear to be high-tech graphics. Yet what appears improvisational is in fact pre-meditated. All his doodles have a pedigree. Laskers’s work reveals an acute visual intelligence, along with a sense of contagious fun.

According to Grace Gluck of the New York Times, sculptor John Newman’s “inventive artifacts, cozily arranged on a horseshoe-shaped table, look like caricatures of more respectable sculptures, playfully wrought by a doodler in different modes. With more than a dash of chutzpah, they mix biomorphic, geometric and many isms, folding in elements from Miró, Henry Moore, tribal works, comic-strip images, industrial machinery, earth formations and dozens of other sources, all laced by Mr. Newman's freewheeling imagination.”

Paul Henry Ramirez’s biomorphic blobs splish, splash and spew across pristine fields of brightly hued geometries. His invented forms have irrepressible personalities and insatiable appetites that exist in a state of total self-indulgence that we cannot help but envy. These bubble gum hued cartoony creations seem sprung from our collective unconscious, and yet cavort in compositions that are perfectly orchestrated. Sometimes shocking, always good-natured, these paintings make us laugh out loud.

Heide Trepanier uses paint to create odd, sad and sometimes violent narratives. Her cartoon based, organic abstractions can be read as metaphors of human nature freed from the dictates of good behavior. According to the artist, her paintings “misbehave, throw up on each other, have orgies, rip each other apart, become divas, destroy small towns, ride waves of paint, and produce other worlds.”

Sofi Zezmer’s color-saturated painterly assemblages defy categorization. Her flamboyant wall sculptures are made from synthetic materials with their attendant palette of neon hues, including badminton birdies and drinking straws, I.V. drip tubing, construction netting and cable ties. Zezmer’s cartoony creations are both buoyant and menacing. They suggest irrational Duchampian hybrids of mechanical and biological systems, embodiments of the complexity of life in the genetic age.

An opening reception of Michaël Amy’s exhibition, Quirky, will be held at the Westport Arts Center on Friday, November 9, 6:30 to 8:00 pm. On November 29 at 7:00 pm, curator Michaël Amy will lead a discussion of the artwork on display. On the morning of Thursday, December 6, Tom O’Connor, a Westport resident and art historian, will give an informal talk about the art work in Quirky in the context of contemporary American art. Both the Curator’s Talk and Morning Art Talk are aimed at new and experienced art viewers.

Educational Programs and Group Visits:

School groups and other visitors may receive interactive guided tours of Quirky. The Westport Arts Center’s Education and Outreach Manager, Anne Penrosa, will prepare curriculum materials that aid in making meaningful connections between the exhibition and school curricula.

Quirky is on view at the Westport Arts Center through December 19. For more information, contact Westport Arts Center at 203-222-7070, www.westportartscenter.org, or visit the gallery, M-F, 10–4 and Sat– Sun 12 -4 at 51 Riverside Avenue, Westport.