Express and Repeat
Dushko Petrovich’s solo exhibition opens tomorrow at Sherman Gallery
Click on the slide show above to learn more about Dushko Petrovich’s painting style. Photos by Kimberly Cornuelle
An open jaw, a sphinx, and a flower. These images appear again and again in Dushko Petrovich’s watercolors and oil paintings, which are on display in a solo exhibition at the Sherman Gallery starting this week.
“Most of my ideas come from working on a particular image over and over,” says Petrovich (CFA’06), the founding editor of Paper Monument, a contemporary art journal, and a past artist in residence at the Royal Academy in London. “There aren’t many ideas that are external to the work.”
Petrovich, a graduate painting fellow at the College of Fine Arts, first gravitated to the images while working on a translation of poems by Italian poet Eugenio Montale. He began creating paintings to accompany the poems, and five images stuck — a horse, a landscape, a sphinx, a flower, and a jaw. During the last year, he has focused on the flower, the sphinx, and the jaw.
“For me, there are things that can only be expressed through painting,” says Petrovich. “If I could express them in words, I wouldn’t have to paint. I don’t really have a choice.”
Dushko Petrovich: Works on Paper is on display from Tuesday, November 11, through Friday, December 19, at the Sherman Gallery in the George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Ave. The opening reception is Friday, November 14, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays, and 1 to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays; admission is free and open to the public. For more information, call 617-358-0295.
Kimberly Cornuelle can be reached at kcornuel@bu.edu.
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