At once dynamic and serene, the paintings of Anna Rita Alatan elegantly transform imagined worlds into visual reality. ARA, as Alatan is also known, discovered painting while studying fashion at Accademia di costume e di Moda in Rome. She switched her focus from fashion to painting, encouraged by this new, expressive outlet for her dreamy narratives. Over the past 44 years Alatan has exhibited her artwork worldwide, in locations including the United Arab Emirates, Paris, Austria and Taipei.Using paint as a tool for discovery, Alatan unearths unconscious worlds by prioritizing the conceptual and allowing icons and forms to tell a story that the viewer can relate to and explore in their own way. In her creation of what she calls “emotional dream worlds,” the artist utilizes a keen sense of spatial and compositional components to give presence and meaning to female subjects and abstract backgrounds, essentially transforming the world of dreams into a convincing realness.This November, ARA will be exhibiting her work in a solo exhibition at Agora Gallery. The Poetry of Color: A Solo Exhibition by Anna Rita Alatan demonstrates the artist’s interpretations of the realm between dreams and waking life, showing singular stories in dramatic detail. Melancholy purples, joyous reds and golds, and deep, passionate blues elevate her art to capably explore the traditionally intangible world of dreams. Alatan’s work effortlessly transports the viewer to worlds of pure gold and floating flowers, and to the interior thoughts of her composed figures. Soft, cool pastels occasionally contrasted with scarlet and shining gold emphasize the mirage-like quality of the figures, who dance around each canvas, caught among gauzy fabrics and blossoming flowers. Slender forms stretch across the paintings with serene expressions, stoic and transplanted to a place of deeper feeling. The figures exist between liveliness and nonexistence, with sunken eyes and mask-like faces, and each form at once sinks into the background and bursting from it, like dreams sliding in and out of focus.The Poetry of Color runs from November 4 to November 25, 2014, at Agora Gallery, located at 530 West 25th Street in New York, NY. The opening reception will be held on November 6 from 6 to 8 pm.
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