Penn Student Galleries presents first exhibit

Penn Student Gallery's first exhibit of the year, "Under Reality, Above Abstraction," opened with a reception yesterday in Houston Hall's Bowl Room. The exhibit features recent work from one undergraduate and three graduate students. Penn Student Gallery's curator Jennifer Rizzi said that the show's purpose is to present "abstract pictures that represent basic realities." The artists became involved with the show through advertisements in various publications and flyers around campus. Benn Lewis, an Engineering sophomore, said he merges his art with his interest in science. "It's taking something modern and placing it in a classical format," he said. He contributed two acrylic paintings, Neuron and Three Figures along with two photographs to the show. Allene Steinberg, a first year Education School graduate student displayed her two oil paintings, Mom's Birthday Poem and Bubby said a Lithuanian Village Vanished One Night. She also presented a "water and mixed media piece" Ashes with poems, which she read to the viewers. "I need to have more than one way to express myself," she said. "You can't divorce visual art from the written word." College senior and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts graduate Larry Bahrych said he was pleased with the exhibition. "It's an experience for me to see my work hanging . . . in a new context" and to see the "reaction of students at Penn," he said. Bahrych said his work is primarily a reaction to director Ingmar Bergman's films. "I attempted to paint . . . the overall feeling that I experienced while watching these films," Bergman said. Most of the student artists said they were pleased with the reception, and hope for an opportunity to show their works in the future. "I think it turned out pretty nicely," Wharton Junior Arjun Kochhar. Kochhar said this was his first showing.