Singing The Tune Without Words

The exhibition brings together the two artist’s shared love of painting, abstraction, and poetic meaning.

About the Artists

Tara Costello has been developing an abstract language through painting to contemplate aspects of quiet spaces. She is particularly interested in the interplay of color and the simplicity of geometric shapes. She works with rich Venetian plaster and trowels on cradled panels. The plaster is a malleable material, when used in layers it allows her to question aspects of time, light, and space. She paints to find beauty in the tension between the illusion of a felt space and the mark that created it.

Ute Bertog’s work is a continued meditation on the reluctant relationship between abstract painting and language. Her starting points are words and fragments of text that are collected from her everyday environment. In both cases her process is very much informed by various repetitive additive and subtractive procedures: erasing, covering, tracing, scraping and rearranging, transforming the words until only a faint glimmer of legibility is left. This process signifies a practice of reaching beyond the safety that words, recognizable shapes, and forms impart to open and explore the possibilities for expanded sensibilities. Her goal is to create the right conditions, where imagination and play readily fill in any gaps, offering the chance to reinterpret and expand original intent. Over the years her love for pliable materials lead her eventually to explore ceramics, which she will showcase here for the first time alongside her paintings.

Gallery Hours
Saturday and Sunday: 12:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Image Credit:  
(left) Ute Bertog, Wanderlust, 2021, 24x18", oil on canvas
(right) Tara Costello, Angle, 2021, 8x10", venetian plaster