PRESS, MEDIA & PRIVATE COLLECTORS
6.30pm Saturday 03 May 2008

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
From 7pm till late Saturday 03 May 2008
Gallery open Monday-Saturday 9a.m-5p.m.
Sundays & Private Viewings by appointment

EXHIBITION CLOSING DATE
Saturday 31 May 2008

VENUE
Gallery Opium, 315/26 Thepprasit Road M12, Banglamung, Pattaya City, Chonburi 20150, Thailand

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
John Biangazzo and Nartana Holzweiler

Just one individual painting is said to 'uplift a whole house'. With 40 pieces of their most recent paintings, this exhibition aims to give a rare mystical and powerful experience. “Each painting is alive and speaks to everyone uniquely. We invite you to let the magic of these paintings touch you . . .”

Artist profile: Nartana Holzweiler
Nartana was born on April 20th, 1959 in Aachen, Germany; the son of an artist and a teacher.

During his formative years, with the encouragement of his mother, he frequented the Art Museums, which provided a sanctuary for a young man, witness to a divided Germany.

At age 16, he began his formal education in art at Fachoberschule fuer Gestaltung, followed by Fachhochschule fuer visuelle Kommunikation.

From childhood onwards Nartana painted. What began as a means of escape became, for him, a meditation. The immediacy of paint provided Nartana with a medium through which he could encapsulate moments; recording, as you will in a diary, transient states of being; striving, always, for the state of “no mind”.

Prompted by an increasing dedication to his spiritual life Nartana left Germany and travelled with paint and brushes extensively throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, eventually establishing himself as an artist and member of the Counsel or the Arts and the Society of Artists in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Nartana invites the viewer to engage on a more subconscious level, through form, texture, colour and space, endeavouring to create a place in which viewers can enter into their own dialogue.

His work has been exhibited in galleries in Aachen, Berlin, Amsterdam, India and throughout the Southwest of the US and recently in Thailand.

Artist profile: John Biangazzo
John Biangazzo was born in New York City in 1957 of Italian and Spanish heritage. He is a true renaissance man with the visual arts being only one of his forms of expression. A musician, singer songwriter, a trained classical dancer in New York and a writer of Hiku poetry . . . But painting is in his Spanish blood!

In the late 1800s, his great grandfather was a famous painter in the Spanish province of Southern Sevilla.

John also has a dream of opening a museum for his private collection, he has works by European and Asian Masters from the eighteenth century to present times.

His great influences are T.M.W. Turner and John Martin who were two of the greatest eighteenth century’s landscape artists, and both these artists also are a part of John’s private collection.

Artist's Statement
“In my own work, I attempt to convey a sense of the vast, nebulous yet palpable mystery that we are all intimately a part of . . .”
“what is UNSEEN, is oftentimes most deeply understood. . .”

> Email: info@galleryopium.com
> Website: www.galleryopium.com

> Diamond Mountain

> Artist Nartana Holzweiler

> Book of Wisdom by
Nartana Holzweiler

> Garden of Light by
John Biangazzo

> Artist John Biangazzo

> Open by
Nartana Holzweiler