The Gallery at Enteros Design presents its June show, a solo exhibition from North Carolina artist Nathaniel Hester. 

Selected works from a series of 20 serigraph (silkscreen) prints are sure to delight and perplex.  Animal Farm is a collection of colorful abstracts bearing straightforward titles as Pig, Buck, and Cow.  Hester says he wants to create art full of “mystery and wonder.”  He invites viewers to re-examine the familiar in a new and playful way.  His paintings and prints investigate the incongruous harmonies of the American landscape. “I made a list of about 35 favorites, animals that I have a particular relationship with,” he said in a recent interview.  Crab was inspired by a visit to Manteo 25 years ago when he dipped chicken necks into a marsh to lure crabs. Cow includes a big black rectangle because when Hester looks at a field of cows they appear rectangular.

Hester received his masters from Boston University and has traveled to France, New York, San Francisco, and Kyoto Japan during his studies.  His art has been exhibited and collected widely and is part of the permanent collection at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.  After switching his focus from hoping to become an agronomist to art history and completing a fellowship in Paris, Hester concluded that while he embraced the notion of avant-garde, it had been sidetracked.  “The safest thing you can do today is to try to shock somebody,” Hester said. “I didn’t want to live in that ironic disposition, what the critic Hilton Kramer calls the ‘free-floating hostility to life itself.’ I wanted to make felt, earnest work about what I saw and experienced but that wasn’t autobiographical.”

“Some of them are mysterious, some of them are silly,” he said. “But all of them are honest.”

Animal Farm opens with a reception on Friday, June 13, from 6 pm to 10 pm, on display for the month of June.

Light refreshments will be served.  This event is free and open to the public.

Enteros is located at 314 Exchange Alley, Petersburg VA (behind Siege Museum)
Contact for more info: 804.861.1200  |  enterosdesign.com