Gallery Neptune's May exhibition proudly features a brand new body of work by a veteran of the Washington, DC artist community, Lisa Montag Brotman.
Since the mid 1970's Brotman has been exhibiting her surrealistic, brilliant figurative paintings in the Washington, DC area first with Gallery Rebecca Cooper and then throughout the 1980's into the mid 1990's with Gallery K, accumulating nine solo exhibitions. Her work has been critically reviewed by American University's Katzen Center director, Jack Rasmussen, and highlighted in a retrospective which he curated at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore in the fall of 2001. Brotman has been reviewed in Art in America (April 2002) and is included in a long list of public and private collections including The John A. Wilson Building City Hall Art Collection, The George Washington University and The Artery Collection.
In her Neptune solo exhibition "RAPT", Brotman invites us closer to her subjects. The women in these new works are directly related to those portrayed in her prior paintings which appear in full figure and are often set in surrealistic landscapes. If the former paintings portrayed mostly nude, sexually confident women in interior or exterior settings, seated or standing, sometimes with props such as a futuristic armoire or exotic vegetation, the new work crops the picture plane to allow us a closer view of the subject's psychological state which is more existential and uncertain rather than narrative and associative. By removing the horizon line and cropping the figures to reveal only their heads and partial torsos, Brotman invites us to analyze at a much closer range the essence of what is mesmerizing her women.
As in past paintings repetitious shapes behind her subjects is present, but without any formal elements other than the subject herself, this "wallpaper" now serves as a sort of energy field, a visual symbol of the source for each figure's fixation. In choosing a title for this exhibit, Brotman felt that "RAPT" summarized a list of adjectives which accurately describe an intangible sensation for women who through their feminine, sensuous receptors investigate what is alluring without the threat of losing their ability to discern between reality and false expectations.
Although these women are all beautiful and beautifully painted, with their eyes often closed they are not limited or concerned with their physical attributes. They can't see us and they don't need to. Of greater import is their moment in time, delving into that which is ambiguous.