Cheymore Gallery is happy to announce the opening of Stephen Zeifman 'Newfoundland'.   November 26- January 21, 2012

The works in this exhibition could only have been created in Newfoundland. They represent a visual response to the landscape and the architecture surrounding Stephen Zeifman on the Bonavista Peninsula. Newfoundland is a place of essences and in these works, reductive in the modernist sense , Zeifman has removed all non essential detail in order to produce an expression of his experience that is clear and direct. It is the visual equivalent of speaking directly from the heart.

With the assemblages, like Kurt Schwitters before him, an artist who said he painted with a hammer, Zeifman too is drawn to materials he finds on the beaches that retain traces of human use, weather and forgotten craftsmanship. There are also organic and biomorphic forms that are irresistible and have to be picked up and carried back to the studio. It is the materials themselves that after days or months of lying around the studio determine how they will be used, how they will rub up against each other to create a visual tonality. 

Zeifman works with trowels, scrapers and palette knives, as well as a hammer and nails, rarely using a brush, feeling that he is constructing a piece rather than painting it. 

Zeifman first exhibited his paintings and photographs at Ideé Gallery in Toronto in 1981. His work has been exhibited in the United States and Canada and is in many private collections. 

Stephen Zeifman is the founder and director of Mill Road Studio in Port Rexton, Newfoundland.