Untamed, an exhibition of new work by New Orleans-based artist Sibylle Peretti, will be on view at Heller Gallery from March 24-April 30, 2022. 

The exhibition focuses on six new collaged, opaline glass wall panels depicting individual animals, a frequent subject of Peretti’s work, set in magical vignettes adorned with beads, crystals, feathers, ginger stalks and sunflowers.  She combines altered and manipulated photographic prints or drawings on paper with the slumped and mirrored glass substrate making the pieces dimensional.  The subtle layering of various opaline densities allows her to create a subtle, but almost infinite range of whites, pinks and blues, which lend even her most intimate pieces a sky-like expansiveness.  Her chosen animals —a fox, a rabbit, a hawk— are the inhabitants of hinterlands, areas where encroaching civilization meets the wilderness, one of the front lines in the struggle for a better ecological and environmental balance. With this body of work Peretti poses questions about the fragile moment in our quest to stop the human degradation of the environment.  

Her works are an affirmation of life, represented by the animals she portrays, as well as a warning of the impending loss—societal & environmental—that she has witnessed in the industrial wastelands of her native Germany and the eroding and increasingly flooded lowlands of her adopted Louisiana home.

In addition to the six new single-panel pieces, Untamed will feature one multi-panel work, and three cast sculptures, as well as a six-part installation of Glass Notes, an ongoing collaboration between Peretti and her husband, artist Stephen Paul Day.

Born in Mulheim an der Ruhr, Germany, Sibylle Peretti first studied glassmaking & design at the State School of Glass in Zwiesel and continued her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cologne, Germany, where she received her MFA in Sculpture and Painting in 1993.  Peretti’s work can be found in the collections of the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, the newly established Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, VA and most recently to the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, AL.  Peretti’s work is also included in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA), Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Canada), Museum of Applied Arts (Frankfurt, Germany), Hunter Museum (Chattanooga TN), Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), 21c Museum (Louisville, KY). 

Peretti has won numerous awards and endorsements, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, as well as the 2013 United States Artist Fellowship. In 2018, her work was featured in a solo exhibition Promise and Perception: The Enchanted Landscapes of Sibylle Peretti, at the Chrysler Museum of Art.  www.sibylleperetti.com