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Sanda Iliescu: Arrivals
24 August, 2019 - 22 September, 2019
In the City of Z, Memories of Rome, 2018. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 x 12.5″ sold
Alphabet on the Beach, 2019. Colored pencil on paper, 32 drawings unframed, 10 x 8″ each
In the City of Zi : At Water’s Edge #2, 2018. Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 29.25″
In the City of Zi: At Water’s Edge #2, 2018. Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 29.25″ sold
Peter’s Park: Lagoon, 2018. Media: Graphite, Watercolor, and Gouache on paper, 10 x 10″
To see more from the Peter’s Park series, click here. 
My Mother’s Bird, 2015. Thread, ink and collage on paper, 8 x 8″ sold
To see more from the Birds Series, An Unexpected Aviary, click here.
Angel with Bird, 2019. Ink on paper, 18 x 12 inches
To see more from the Angels Series, click here.
Sonnet XI, 2019. Oil on canvas, 18 x 18″
To see more from the Sonnets series, click here.
Blanket #1, 2019. Oil on board, 12 x 12″
To see more from the Blankets Series, click here.
The Blue Pool: Color Meditation, 2017. Color pencil on paper, 10 x 10″ sold
Estelle’s Collection: Broken Umbrellas (No. 2), 2015. Collage, pencil, and ink on paper, 9 x 9”, 14 x 14”, framed
Sand Sketches: No. 2, 2015. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 10”, 12 x 14” framed
Sand Sketches: No. 1, 2015. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 10”, 12 x 14” framed
Estelle: At the Beach, 2015. Mixed media, 9 x 9”, 14 x 14” framed
Memories from Childhood: Objects on the Beach, 2015. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 10”, 12 x14” framed
Memories from Childhood: Objects on the Beach, 2015. Watercolor on paper, 8 x 10”, 12 x14” framed
Estelle’s Collection: Broken Umbrellas (No. 1), 2015. Collage, pencil, and ink on paper, 9 x 9”, 14 x 14” framed
In the Gray Courtyard: Color Meditation,2017. Colored pencil on paper, 10 x 10”, 11 ½ x 11 ½” sold
The Red House: Color Meditation, 2017. Colored pencil on paper, 10 x 10”, 11 ½ x 11 ½” framed sold
Castle Indigo: Color Meditation, 2017. Colored pencil on paper, 10 x 10”, 11 ½ x 11 ½” framed sold
In the City of Zi: At Water’s Edge #3, 2018. Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 29.25″
In the City of Zi: At Water’s Edge #4, 2018. Oil on canvas, 23.5 x 29.25″[/tlg_tabs_content][tlg_tabs_content icon=”” title=”Installation Shots”]
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Les Yeux du Monde is excited to present for our initial show of the 2019 fall season Sanda Iliescu: Arrivals, from August 24 to September 22. Born in Romania, Iliescu received her BSE in Civil Engineering and her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University. She is a well-known and beloved professor of art and architecture at UVA, winning the National Beginning Design Faculty award in 2017, and an artist who has exhibited her art globally and has received many prestigious awards including the Rome Prize, a McDowell fellowship, and the Distinguished Artist Award of the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Her writing on aesthetic issues in art and design includes the book The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art and the forthcoming Looking Deeply: Essays on Art, Architecture, and Design as well as countless articles including “The Garden as Collage,” “Beyond Cut-And-Paste,” and “Art and Community: Making Public Art on a University Campus.” With her students, she has created many public art projects, responding to current campus and world issues of discrimination and violence.
This exhibition will feature a wide sampling of Iliescu’s paintings, drawings and collages, all bound together with a common theme of magic or a surprising eruption of the sacred in the mundane. The artist writes of the show’s title: “Arrival suggests for me arriving at a magical, imaginary place of both presentness (being in the present) and memories (remembering the past).” Magical messengers—birds, angels, some weeping, flying umbrellas and more—populate the paintings and collages. Her birds are from a series she drew with her non-dominant, left hand, producing one a day for about 5 years, and their freedom and expressiveness is astounding for such spare and linear compositions. Sometimes she embellishes with sewing and collaged paper or texts. Of birds, she writes, “Birds are somewhat fantastical—miraculous even. They do something we humans cannot naturally do: they fly, float, and dance in the air.” Angels are also marvelous messengers and intermediaries from another realm. She writes that they “arrived” as a surprise one day when she was feeling down and she started drawing figures, neither male nor female, but weeping. She began to feel compassion for them and wanted to give them “something to hold on to,” so she gave them wings and thus this series was born. It grew to include a wide variety of angelic beings in many different personalities and guises. They are deceptively simple, though infinitely varied and expressive through only her sure and masterful line. Other works in the show are from the series In the City of Zi, and Peter’s Park, created during her time in Zurich in 2018 as a Truninger Art Fellow. These give a nod to one of her favorite, also Swiss, artists of Modernism, Paul Klee, in their rhythmic and surprising geometry, color and subjects.