About the artist:

Energy is an eternal delight, and from the earliest times artists have tried to capture movement in some durable hydroglyphic. It is perhaps the first subject of all art. Helene Guetary creates an astonishing representation of energy in her drawings and lithographics. She has turned the human body into an incarnation of energy. Her work has attained the uninhibited grace and flow of nature. Movement is her primary concern, and through her art we can relive in our own bodies the illusive movements of joy. Her work thereby enhances the viewer's vitality and participation with the work of art, which, as all thinkers of art have reflected on, is one of the chief sources of aesthetic pleasure. Helene Guetary's figures bound along with an elastic rhythm, as if by sheer magic, creating an enduring pattern of athletic dancing energy with her inexhaustible succession of linear invention. She recreates the movement of a poem. Taking transitory movements of action, she constructs a diagram of energy, and through the disposition of the elements in her drawings she reveals a clarity of logic. Her subtle and posed drawings have a balanced completeness that retains the rhythmic flexibility of her initial inspiration. Just as drapery was used by the Greeks to enhance body movements, Helene uses linear references, prisms drawn in eternity to punctuate and define her composition. She has discovered poses and movements that express something more than physical abandonment. Her images refer to spiritual liberation and ascension achieved through dance. Helene Guetary's gestures speak a clear symbolic language. The art of dance has a profound influence on her. It accounts not only for the rhythms of movement in her drawings but also for her attitude about freedom. Helene uses the dance so well that it is interpreted almost as precisely as the written word. Helene is an absorbed and experienced young artist. These fine drawings bespeak of soundly constructed compositions. We must suppose that her use of ruled geometric lines are, in spite of the implied static and finite character, able to fill her drawings with the feeling of action. Helene's sure feeling for space and placement is one of her greatest strengths as an artist. The Greeks' passion for geometry led them to imagine a profile in which the nose continues the line of the forehead, so Helene uses the line for its own sake and as a structural and expressive device. The lines continue the flow of her imagination in reconstructing a spider web of thoughts suspended around her figures, making her compositions simple and compact areas of energy. Guetary's drawings eloquently illustrate the elements in which the body is remembered for its joy and sensuous participation in the world rather than its weight and dignity. Guetary's dancers have surrendered their will to an ecslacy of celebration, motivated by some irrational and intuitive power. Her figures make no calculated or purposeful leaps to escape from gravity,they remain precariously balanced, poised in an equilibrium of enthusiasm. We are hypnotized by the dancers' movements as we are by swirling water. Nature, being the source of all life, is a continued reference in Guetary's work. She reminds us that we could hardly conceive of life removed from this source of energy and celebration. Helene was born in Paris in 1957. She studied painting with the Spanish painter Joaquim Ramo and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She studied sculpture at the Chicago Art Institute. Helene moved to New York City in 1976 where she studied etching and lithography at the School of Visual Arts. She has worked in both the fine arts and as a freelance illustrator. She has worked in collaboration with many publications, among them Viva, Elle, Playboy, Depeche Modes, Jacine, GAP, Over 21, Essence, Adix, Interview Magazine and most recently on the cover and inside of Zoom magazine. INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS 1976 Galerie 2 Images, Gargilesse, France 1977 Harkness Gallery, New York 1978 Le Losange d'Or, Monte Carlo 1979 Dorfman Gallery, New York COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS 1974 St. Cloud Painter's Salon, France FlAP, Paris 1975 Fine Arts School, Paris 1977 Harkness Gallery, New York Chatou Painter's Salon, France 1978 Galerie Au Fond de Ia Cour, Paris 1979 New York Art Expo Galerie 'Ceil 200, Chafeauroux, France Dorfman Gallery, New York PERMANENT COLLECTIONS The Harkness Collection, New York Pace University, New York Colby Sawyer College, New Hampshire Harmozi Collection, Tehran