Marsha Mateyka Gallery is pleased to present, “Athena Tacha: Shapes of Fluidity, photo-environments and sculpture”.  The exhibition includes recent large photoworks and intimate scale sculptures.  It is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Athena Tacha has been known nationally for decades for her public, large-scale, site specific projects.  Her numerous public commissions include:
       “Connections” at Franklin Town Park*, Philadelphia, PA, 1981-92
       “Green Acres”, Dept. of Environmental Protection, Newark, NJ, 1985-87
       “Victory Plaza” American Airlines Center, Dallas, TX, 2000-01
       “Muhammad Ali Plaza”, Louisville, KY, 2002-09
       “Bloomingdale’s Plaza with Light Obelisk Fountain”, Bethesda, MD, 2000-09
Athena Tacha belongs to a generation of pioneering artists including Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer and others, who in the 1970’s “defined the form and the role of public art in relation to space and the need of its users. … The demand for retrieval and replacement of the natural landscape within the urban fabric was a key element in the public sculpture.”...**

In recent years, Athena Tacha has shifted her attention to photoworks and small scale sculptures.  The former were first shown in Washington, DC at her solo exhibition, titled “Small Wonders” in 2006, at the American University Museum, Katzen Center. The works in the current gallery exhibition draw upon her extensive travels, in recent years, to remote locations in Jordan, Syria, Namibia, Iceland and Ethiopia, at the Danakil Depression.  In each instance, her focus is on the dynamic nature of these remote landscapes.  Her current photo-environments are the result of combining numerous photographs from each site, to form a distilled image; one that reveals the impact of wind, water, sand or lava. “Shapes of Fluidity”, as described in her own words…

               Wind, sand and water flow and form Petra.
                Water, wind and sand later dissolve and reshape it.
                Lava flows and congeals into rock, creating Iceland.
                Water and wind blow and reshape its lava stone.
                Lava oozes underwater with miraculous colors
                in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression.
                Fish swim in water, shells are formed by it.
                Birds soar and dive in the air, shaped by it.
                Flow creates and dominates the universe.
                                                                                         Athena Tacha, 2016
                                                                                         Washington, DC

The artist’s works are in the collections of many major museums including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX.