This exhibit is FREE to the public and will be on display during library hours Monday--Friday 9 am-6 pm, starting Friday, October 17, 2025, through Friday, November 7, 2025.
Andrea Kielpinski's "S P A C I O U S"
Kielpinski's Bio:
Andrea Kielpinski is a painter, photographer, and chameleon. Her work reflects her eclectic journey: artist to engineering researcher to therapeutic musician to artist. Andrea’s practice is grounded in formal arts studies (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University Music School); Asian calligraphy training; and her work in molecular physics and fluid transfer.
Textured abstraction; archetypal line and symbol; and close documentation of the everyday are recurrent themes, united by her sense of the poetic and of the overlooked. Andrea’s painting processes of veiling and uncovering express the complexity of these half-hidden meanings. Recently she’s returned to a seemingly contrasting mode: the stark minimalism of black-and-white photography. Both require acute observation of the present moment.
Andrea recently completed an artist residency at Chateau Orquevaux’s International Artist Residency Program in France. Her work is carried in the Chicago area at Clay and Company, and in central Arkansas at the Central Arkansas Collective Gallery in Conway, Arkansas.
Artist's Statement:
Last fall, I spent a few weeks living in a chateau in France, focused solely on making art. I felt that the outer world was on a precipice, contracting into fear, division. Yet–who knows why, at such a moment?--I was let loose, living and working in a place filled with joy and art and endless espresso.
Something was indeed set loose. In the work: bigger canvases, archetypal symbols, shimmering color. In myself: a sense of emerging from a very old box whose sides had fallen away. The word “spacious” kept reverberating there in France, in my light-filled studio by day, in my impossibly grand chateau bedroom each night. This show presents many of the works made in that studio. Maybe you can sense a box dissolving as you view them.
Afterward, back at home, I continued working with that theme: spacious. But it became harder and harder to get back to that feeling. The irony of grasping at spaciousness wasn’t lost on me. I even wondered if it was an affront to the violent constrictions so many people face, to make art from the spaciousness I could still find. One day I met an old friend on the street and voiced that concern. No, she said, now is when your art needs to remind us that “spacious” exists, always. So I kept going.
May you be reminded.
This is the secondary branch of the William F. Laman Public Library located in the heart of the Argenta Arts District of North Little Rock.
