BLACK BUTTERFLIES & SMOULDERING ASHES 2006
   132x132 acrylic on canvas

PRESS RELEASE

Galerija Karas is delighted to announce the first Zagreb solo exhibition by British born painter Rebecca Sitar (b.1969) whose past solo shows include Hinterland (2004) & Ritual (2001) The Eagle Gallery, London, Mind Breaths The Turnpike Gallery, (2000) & Lightness & Weight, The Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (1997).

Neither figurative nor abstract, Sitar’s practice has been described as ‘hermetic’ in its resistance to following any single orthodoxy . The paintings are self-evidently process led. Their surfaces bear the trace of a post –Richter detachment and yet they also show things that seem profoundly personal. Particular objects or incidents in paint are held up for inspection , requiring and eliciting a subjective response.
‘Hinterland’ The Eagle Gallery, Emma Hill

Sitar has dual ethnic heritage. Sitar presently lives and works in Manchester, England. Her mother is British, her father is Croatian. Throughout her child & adulthood she has continued to return to Croatia, particularly Zagreb.

Present & Elsewhere refers to an implicit duality that exists in the paintings in part by an art historical context . Present  with reference to subtle characteristics that bring attention to the painting as an object,  simultaneously  recalling traits of modernism revisited. These culled languages of formalist abstraction are subverted with a fusion of figuration that set up a narrative of  a fictitious landscape, a no place, a painted illusory place, through which emblems hover, in a space that is ungrounded, somewhere ‘other’ most certainly someplace elsewhere.

Objects can be understood as reliquaries, standing in for a body , a person or a presence that is not there. Icarus falling from the sky in the corner of Breughel’s painting as described in Auden’s poem Musee de Beaux Arts comes to mind; things half remembered , the incidental caught out of the corner of the eye.
The Saying of Small Things by Sue Hubbard, exhibition catalogue Present & Elsewhere

Present & Elsewhere also reflects the paradox of how we experience time and draw from our memory. So often, how in the present , we project ourselves or recall the past. Memory, therefore, becomes the mechanism by which we attempt to give shape and meaning to life; it sifts the wheat from the chaff.’
Sue Hubbard/The Independent Review/Rebecca Sitar

Sitar has been included in a number of notable exhibitions including ;Conscious Fiction Eagle Gallery, London, Beyond the Endgame-Abstract Painting in Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Slow-Burn –Meaning & Vision in Contemporary British Abstract Painting (nationally touring UK, originated Mead Gallery, Warwick).

The exhibition has been supported by Arts Council England, The British Council , The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia ,City Office of Cultural Affairs, Zagreb & The University of Bolton and will tour to The Eagle Gallery, London, England in April 2007.

For further information contact: hdlu@hdlu.hr or rsitar@hotmail.com