Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to announce Ion Zupcu's solo exhibition, Color Works, opening Feb 14th, 2025. Please join us for the artist's reception, Feb 28, 6-8 pm.

Ion Zupcu is a master of the pictorial stage. His stage does not have live actors, live audience or a theater, but Ion Zupcu certainly creates a lot of colorful drama. Zupcu constructs all of his work on top of a small table in his studio. His tools are paper, paint and scissors, and most essential, his camera. Zupcu utilizes his tools to make small paper sculptures that he carefully places in a constructed space. These sculptures are lighted and then photographed at very close range, allowing for a powerful interaction of figure and ground. His paper sculptures hold the stage. They are imbued with vitality and imagination.

Zupcu’s current exhibition, Color Works, is a survey of his color photography, beginning with his Works on Paper series, a sepia-toned body of work, and then evolving into vibrant color in Sculptures, Etudes on Glass and most recently Day Dreams. As each series developed, Zupcu’s compositions and forms become more complex. The elegant simplicity of the geometric forms in Works on Paper segued into robust and interpretive constructions in Sculptures. The artist playfully references icons from the annals of sculpture, such as Victory of Samathrace and Venus de Milo. Although paper thin, Sculptures has a commanding presence. His next series, Etudes in Glass expresses a new level of interpretation. Zupcu creates forms and space that attempt to visualize the essence of the music of Philip Glass. The series utilizes a wide variety of forms and colors, with a discipline that connects the entire series through repetition and layers.

In Day Dreams, Zupcu truly becomes the master of his childhood dramas. The forms and patterns have a narrative quality in which the artist colors a psychological space. The central figures are no longer purely formal, but animated with the challenges that their complex surroundings command. Although still created with paper, paint, scissors and the camera, Day Dreams are dramas that are as old as time.

Location: Ellen Miller Gallery, 460 Harrison Avenue, A16 Boston, MA 02118.