PHILADELPHIA – Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its March exhibition, Calamity Jane featuring new work by Nathan Pankratz.

Calamity Jane is a catastrophic love story; one that hovers between festival and tragedy.  Pankratz’s tightly packed paintings of glossy “cut out” acrylic shapes evoke notions of landscapes in transition.  His paintings play with ideas of rendering and form, equating painting to a practice of accrual and collage.  Amassed fragments shift in opacity, advancing and retreating until space folds in on itself.  

Pankratz works his paintings until they become loosely recognizable through dozens of entry points, allowing each scenario to feel vaguely familiar.  However, the process in the end acts as a vessel to address a more poignant issue: How a celebration of utopian abstraction can incorporate the real.  

Nathan Pankratz holds an MFA from the University of the Arts. He is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid and a faculty member of The Haverford School.  Pankratz’s work has been included in exhibitions both locally and internationally, including Rome and Lausanne, Switzerland.