RAINER GROSS

PAINTER / VISUAL ARTIST

BIOGRAPHY

GENE PRITSKER 

COMPOSER / MULTIMEDIA INSTRUMENTALIST / GUITARIST

BIOGRAPHY

Sounds of Images
A Dialogue between
Music and the Arts
Conceptual Idea and Presentation by
Paolo Bartolani
in collaboration with 
East End Arts Council

Rainer Gross
painter / visual artist
Gene Pritsker
composer / multimedia instrumentalist / guitarist
 at 
EEA Gallery  
11 West Gallery at 11 W. Main St., Peconic Crossing building,
Riverhead, NY 11901 
Friday, November 4th, 2022, at 5:00pm

​Ticket price:
General audience: $ 50
Members of Rites of Spring and Members of East End Arts Council: $ 30
Children Under 16 FREE

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Presentation

T H R I L L I N G  |  E N C H A N T I N G  |  I N T I M ATE
 
RITES OF SPRING MUSIC FESTIVAL | SOUNDS OF IMAGES offers an intimate art experience by listening to and experiencing music and visual art together. Conceived and curated by Artistic Director Paolo Bartolani with the goal of redefining boundaries, SOUNDS OF IMAGES is a live dialogue between the exhibiting artist and the soloist musician that take place during each of the performances.
Sixty-minute performances where live music and visual arts are merged to explore the deep connection between the arts. Participating in SOUNDS OF IMAGES is a unique experience for audiences and artists: an intense exchange between artists who will express their creative process in front of an audience welcomed into intimate spaces and who will have the opportunity to get to know and converse with the artists in an informal setting.

FORMAT of the PERFORMANCE
The performance takes place with two artists on the stage: Rainer Gross, painter, visual artist and Gene Pritsker, composer, multimedia instrumentalist, guitarist.
It is a strange but compelling duet almost an encounter in the ring where both artists are in an awkward situation: the musician who must perform music with a visual artist as partner, while the visual artist presents their visual work, but finds themselves on the stage playing the role of a performer. We are not in the presence of a visual exhibition with musical accompaniment much less we are witnessing an oral presentation by the visual artist.
Instead, we witness the enchantment of two artists who confronted each other on the stage with their own means of expression, seeking where it is possible to make the two arts interact or create contrasts. The performance takes place in the presence of the master of ceremonies who directs the times and durations of each protagonist and the end of the performance. The audience sits with the two artists and actively participates in the pure energy of the performative act.
The performance must necessarily take place in spaces dedicated to the presentation of visual arts such as salons, the art galleries or in the intimate spaces of art studios.

​Rites of Spring Music Festival is supported by private donors and with public funds. From Suffolk County, Grant from SCOCA. the office of Cultural Affairs. 
In collaboration with East End Arts Council

​
About East End Arts & Humanities Council
Since 1972, East End Arts & Humanities Council strives to cultivate and nurture a vibrant arts community on the East End of Long Island that enhances individual and professional artistic development, stimulates community enrichment, economic development, and cultural tourism while encouraging a wide range of creative and artistic expression through education, exhibition and performance, and collaboration across the community. 


Biographies
Rainer Gross, painter, visual artist
For more than 20 years, the artist, born in Cologne (Germany) and living in New York since 1972--in Manhattan, to be precise--has been known on both sides of the Atlantic through numerous exhibitions as an abstract painter.  With the invention of Contact Painting, "a casting technique he developed from traditional monotype and transferred to painting, he created for himself a flexible tool with which he was able to experiment in different directions over many years, a method that enabled him to bring chance and control in varying proportions into the process of painting.  Thus, Rainer Gross was able to add a process-oriented variant to abstract painting, over and above monochrome, color painting, and radical painting.
​
PROCESS:
Gross's work is automatic but not accidental. He creates two surfaces of equal size. On side is built up with dry pigment mixed with water, layer upon layer. This is left to dry completely. The other side is built up with layers of oil paint to the thickness of cakes icing. generally, both begin with the same base color but the artist does not necessarily remember what colors lie underneath the top-most surface. Gross then presses the two sides together, face to face, applying pressure only with his hands. The two surfaces permeate one another, the oil seeps into the dried, water-based pigment, literally impregnating it with its stain. After the two surfaces have sufficiently commingled, they are pulled apart, producing two related, but distinct images. The drying process can take as long as ten weeks. Though he exerts control of the color and subtly manipulates the form, the final work is the unpredictable result of the random pull. He does not work the images or images afterward. This, he says, "would be antithetical to the procedure, akin to messing with nature."
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Pulling the paintings apart is an aggressive action. The formerly independent surfaces have merged into one but are then drawn apart. Gross says of the technique, "there is a violent aspect of the peeling apart -- it is the birthing process of the piece and is part of the nature of the work." Destruction of on gives rise to another -- the synergetic coming together of the two creates somethings related, yet wholly new. They are "fresh and new but at the same time layered and reminiscent of both the former images." The essential randomness of his images is reflected in the randomness of their title which are selected blindly from the New York City phone book.

Gene Pritsker, composer / multimedia instrumentalist / guitarist
Composer/guitarist/rapper/Di.J. Gene Pritsker has written over five hundred compositions, including chamber operas, orchestral and chamber works, electro-acoustic music, and songs for hip-hop and rock ensembles. All his compositions employ an eclectic spectrum of styles and are influenced by his studies of various musical cultures. He is the founder and leader of Sound Liberation; an eclectic hip hop-chamber-jazz-rock-etc. ensemble who have released cd's on Col-legno, Composers Concordance and Innova Records. He is also the co-director of Composers' Concordance, a new music presenting organization with a 30-year history of producing cocnert in NYC. Gene's music has been performed all over the world at various festivals and by many ensembles and performers, including the Adelaide Symphony, MDR Symphony, The Athens Camerata, China Philharmonic Orchestra, Brooklyn, Shanghai and Berlin Philharmonics, Sinfonietta Riga, Orchester des Pfalztheaters, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Anhaltische Philharmonie as well as such soloists such as Anne Akiko Meyers, Lara St. John, Sarah Chang, Kathleen Supové, Martin Kuuskmann and Simone Dinnerstein. He has worked closely with Joe Zawinul and has orchestrated major Hollywood movies, Including Cloud Atlas, for which he wrote additional music and composed his ''Cloud Atlas Symphony’.
The New York Times described him as "...audacious...multitalented." Joseph Pehrson, writing in The Music Connoisseur, described Pritsker as "dissolving the artificial boundaries between highbrow, low brow, classical, popular musics and elevates the idea that if it's done well it is great music, regardless of the style or genre". Raul d'Gama Rose writes in All About Jazz: "Barring the obvious exceptions, much of 21st century composition appears to be thinning in significance, but this might be about to change. Gene Pritsker is one of a very spare handful of composers effecting this change." Evan Burke writes in ICareIf YouListen: "Pritsker seems to look at all music as one genre, in which all other possible styles, sounds and traditions are meant to be used as building blocks and palette colors, combined in various configurations to create a boundless whole. This result is almost always more interesting, and representative of how most new music will be born in the 21st century, as genres and barriers begin to vanish, and as styles begin cross-fertilizing in previously unimagined ways." Classical Music Sentinel writes: "His expressive reach is so wide as to encompass everything from ethno/techno, rock/jazz fusion, classical opera and more, and it all seems to be effortlessly integrated within his anima and comes out through different facets of his persona. You could almost see him as a modern-day renaissance man."
Organizations he is associated with include Co-director of Composers Concordance & Composers Concordance Records, co-founder/guitarist of Absolute Ensemble and artist-in residence at the Austrian Outreach Festival. Gene Pritsker's music is published by: Falls House Press, Gold Branch Music, Periferia Sheet Music & Calabrese Brothers music. Recorded on: Col Legno, Enja, Eutrepe, Wergo, Innova, Composers' Concordance Records, SONY Classical and Capstone record labels.