NEW YORK.- Two solo exhibitions, sculpture by Thomas Kiesewetter and The Shadow Administration, paintings by Sara van der Heide will be on view at the Tilton Gallery from January 6 - February 10. The exhibitions feature Kiesewetter’s bronze sculptures and van der Heide’s dream-like paintings. An opening reception will be held January 6, from 6 - 8 PM, at the Tilton Gallery located at Eight East 76 Street.

Thomas Kiesewetter’s sculptures are abstract, but with the gait and torque of bodies in motion. While they continue the artist’s interest in assembling forms, here he has made them out of cardboard, which were then cast in bronze. As in his previous work in sheet metal, the pieces in this exhibition show the evidence of improvisational construction, resulting from folding, bending, and riveting cardboard. In bronze, Kiesewetter’s forms gain a new sense of volume, while keeping their lively color, achieved now through both traditional patinas and those mixed with pigments, including blue, green, and white.

Kiesewetter’s work features forms related to industry, construction, and the urban environment. At the same time, they have the animated angularity of animal and human movement. These are abstract forms that through their physicality and humor encourage an imaginative response. The sculptures in the exhibition, which have been produced in editions of three, bear a direct relation to the history of modernist sculpture, especially Cubist assemblages and Constructivist forms, and the work of Tatilin. In an ArtForum review, Nell McClister noted that like him, “...Kiesewetter humanizes the industrial while maintaining emphasis on the...nature of industry, and offers [an] updated model of the possibilities for a twenty-first century urban humanity under construction.”

Thomas Kiesewetter started exhibiting his sculptures at the Tilton Gallery in 2003, and has shown his work at ICA Boston, Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles, and in Berlin, including at Galerie Neu, Berlin.

The Shadow Administration, the title of Sara van der Heide’s exhibition of recent paintings hints at both the content and the mood of the work. These large-scale canvases, feature layered images thinly painted in luminous colors. The paintings play with the image and its connotations, combining a multiplicity of perspectives and narratives in a single canvas. Van der Heide’s paintings features human beings and familiar objects in cryptic scenarios, which carry a kind of psychological charge. In her works, images and objects are transformed by memory, feeling and imagination. These are poetic works, whose exact meaning is in the confluence of dream-like images, rather than in an explicit message. Presented in cinematic scale, the paintings immerse the viewer fully in a world of intense color and richly textured imaginary scenarios.

Sara van der Heide has exhibited her work extensively in Europe and the U.S., including a 2004 exhibition at the Kustera/Tilton Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Walker Art center in Minneapolis. The artist is currently in residence at the ISCP program in NYC and will have a solo show in 2008 at the Museum de Pont in Tilburg, Holland.