LIM Gallery / San FranciscoJuly 15 - September 15, 2013

CURRENTS Patter Hellstrom

Above: Eye of the Storm 20” diameter shaped and front plexi mountedBelow: Holding 26” x 40”

Flow is a term coined in 2003 by the American art critic Peter Frank, when he referred to a handful of Californian artists indicating a new direction.

“With the reemergence of abstract painting,” writes Peter Frank, “artists are again exploiting the tendency of (thinned) paint to seep and to gush, to pool and to surge. We see a growing number of artists going with the flow, as it were.” Frank continues,“Until now, Southern California has not been a hotbed of gestural ab-straction like this. But if we regard flow painting as a kind of process art, as an examination of what materials and substances do when placed in the context of visual experimentation, such painting falls right in with the region’s artistic tradition of investigating what stuff does.”

In 2011 LA Weekly said of her work: “Patter Hellstrom, whose calligraphic brushstrokes and daring use of color will have a natural dialogue with the chance element of the flow painters.”

Recently, ArtBusiness critic encouraged the viewer to “Meditate on the conflu-ence of art and spiritual practice here through Patter Hellstrom’s manifes-tations of serene spontaneity,” speaking of her 2013 solo show at the San Francisco Zen Center.

In 2011 of Expressive Flow, her solo show in 2011 in San Francisco at The McLoughlin Gallery they spoke of “Bright colors frozen in motion and abstrac-tion. Wonderful and accessible. These artworks meander their way into your consciousness.” Jason Lahman’s extensive essay about Hellstrom’s of that same year entitled Patter Hellstrom’s Sublime Choreographies of the Centered Self, mentions “the rich acrylic inks slide, stretch and swim across the polypro-pylene, the visual equivalents of musical sounds.....The volatility of liquid has been channeled with extreme skill into compositions that are redo-lent with the rhythms of underlying cosmic processes. One feels that the surface is a laboratory, a theatre to witness the mysterious stages of an alchemical unfolding.”

Hellstrom’s installation Grief Path in 2012 was described by CIIS curator Deirdre Visser as “mapping the emotional, psychological and cognitive dimensions of grief, as they’re experienced through time, Hellstrom’s piece will complicate con-ventional ideas about grief and loss. These conventions include suggestions that it should last only a fixed period of time, or that there is an uni-directional path of healing that will be common from one individual to the next, or even one experi-ence of loss to the next for the same person.”

Sindoor (left) and LOOP (right) both framed to 30” x 37”

Restoration 40” x 26” (left) and Starting Point Center 37” x 30” framed size (right)

(above) LAND, SUN, SKY (below) WIND and MOUNTAIN each piece framed to 23” x 19”

Swan Song 30” x 60” and Holiday Storm 48” x 60” shaped piece

Strange Weather shaped piece 72” x 48”