Seraphin Gallery
1108 Pine Street
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107

Seraphin Gallery announces two exhibitions of new and recent works by young Philadelphia artists Robert Goodman: Night Vision; and Hiro Sakaguchi: Traveler's Tale. Seraphin continues its commitment to fostering the careers of emerging artists, and is especially proud to open its 2007-2008 season by presenting both artists' first solo exhibitions in a commercial art gallery.

An abstract painter of commanding vision and formidable compositional abilities, Goodman's intense canvases are full of unexpected dynamics, jagged forms, hard calculated rhythms, and surprising, spontaneous bursts of color. Informed by the art historical discourses of abstraction, impressionism and surrealism, these works explore the sometimes violent, always intense processes of rupture and transition. When one spatial order is replaced by another, what is created? What is destroyed? How much of the doomed order will remain? How do you navigate the newly unfamiliar, and negotiate the conflicting senses of apprehension and optimism inherent in a fresh terrain?

Taking an altogether different approach to a similar theme, Hiro Sakaguchi makes autobiographical work based on his bi-cultural experiences as a modern-day Japanese émigré in the United States. Drawing on his everyday experiences as an artist in Philadelphia and on a rich reserve of memories of his native Nagano, Sakaguchi infuses his often delicate, emotionally charged drawings, watercolors and acrylics with nostalgia and longing. These contrasting surroundings - tempered with a fair dose of representational imagination - often appear in tandem in his work, connected by recurring motifs such as airplanes, ships, and a lone, backpacked hiker.