UNSPOKEN LANGUAGE OF COLORS

SEPTEMBER 12 - NOVEMBER 1, 2025 

Opening Reception & Dialogue: Friday, September 12 | 6:00 - 8:00 PM 

Artists’ Dialogue: 6:00 - 6:30 PM 

SARAH AMOS | MATTHEW COLAIZZO | CLAIRE DOWNES WHITEHURST | JACOB FEIGE

Pentimenti is pleased to present Unspoken Language of Colors, a group exhibition featuring works by Sarah Amos, Matthew Colaizzo, Claire Downes Whitehurst, and Jacob Feige. 

This exhibition focuses on the quiet, evocative power of color and its ability to communicate without words. In our everyday lives, color shapes our emotions, memories, and perceptions. In Unspoken Language of Colors, each artist engages with color in a way that reflects their individual perspective and values. Pentimenti invites you to look deeper and to consider not only what color is, but the stories it tells through your own lens and lived experience.

SARAH AMOS

Unlike many printmakers, Amos creates art on an enormous scale. Her towering, symbolic imagery draws influence from Aboriginal art and patterning, while also exploring memory and emotion to evoke psychological landscapes that are both personal and collective. These varied elements are refined into bold, abstract shapes and vibrant colors.

The painting on view, rendered in a striking palette of blues, browns, and beige is mounted on a large, custom-made structure, giving it a presence that seems to hover between two and three dimensions. At the same time, Sarah also returns to more traditional formats, creating works on paper. This exhibition presents two works on paper from her ZA series, where monochromatic subtleties meet the intensity of vivid colors in striking harmony. Amos employs both historical and contemporary techniques to create her work, striving to uncover hidden dimensions of our connection with the natural world.

MATTHEW COLAIZZO

Matthew Colaizzo’s work explores the tension between built environments and the barriers that define or enclose them. He invites viewers to see the frame either as a window or as a stage set for unfolding drama. Each brick he has drawn has its own dimensional presence and color, shaping the viewer’s perception and guiding them into a constructed atmosphere. Employing manual drafting techniques, Colaizzo paints with a small brush, transforming the act into a meditative process rooted in repetition and centered on ideas of the grid, color, and space.

CLAIRE DOWNES WHITEHURST 

Claire Downes Whitehurst uses color as both material and metaphor, a sensory language shaped by synesthetic perception. Influenced by religious ornamentation, stained glass, and architectural decoration, her work channels color as a vessel for memory, emotion, and spiritual resonance.

Her ceramics and works on paper incorporate floral imagery to explore the intricate passageways linking the human body, the political body, and the plant body, each governed by distinct yet interconnected systems of growth, tension, and healing. Her practice unfolds like a map, tracing subtle connections between the somatic and the sacred, weaving together intimate personal experience with broader collective embodiment.

JACOB FEIGE 

Jacob Feige’s paintings, including free-standing works, explore the tension between anonymity and individuality in the 21st century, reinterpreting the notion of lost identity in an era shaped by technology.

Vermilion Monuments is a series of double-sided, free-standing paintings ranging in scale from small to large. On one side, Feige paints with vermilion red, a reference to the cover of J.G. Ballard’s science fiction short story collection Vermilion Sands. Both sides feature the same schematic portrait, an anonymous figure depicted from both a frontal and side view. On the reverse side, precise cut-outs are mounted over two central portraits, obscured by layers of vibrant color that enhance depth and create a dynamic interplay of dimension.

For all inquiries, please contact us at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 215.625.9990.

ADDITIONAL EVENT: OLD CITY GALLERY WALK / FIRST FRIDAY | Fri. Oct. 3 | 5 - 8 PM.

Hours: Tuesday – Friday 10 AM – 5 PM, Saturday 12 PM – 5 PM, or by appointment.

Free and open to the public.

SARAH AMOS left Australia to study at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, where she became a certified Master Printer in lithography and received a MFA from the University of Northern Vermont. Her awards include the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; the 2020 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant; and the 2024 Vermont Prize. In 2022, she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Amos has exhibited at the CUE Art Foundation, New York; the Huntington Museum of Art; the USC Fisher Museum of Art; Penn State University; San Jose Institute of Art; and more.

MATTHEW COLAIZZO received a BFA from Tyler School of Art and a MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited at Penn State Abington, Abington, PA; ArtYard, Frenchtown, NJ; Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA; International Print Center, New York, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA, among others. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, Titled Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more. 

CLAIRE DOWNES WHITEHURST  received her BFA from the University of Mississippi, a post-baccalaureate certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an MA from the University of Iowa and from the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN; the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; among others.

JACOB FEIGE received a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work was exhibited at the Stockton University Art Gallery, Galloway, NJ; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; RISD, Providence, RI; the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; and more. In 2024, he was an artist-in-residence at Alfred University Düsseldorf, Germany, and in 2018 at the Princeton Cyprus Expedition, Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus. He was awarded a New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2022. His work was featured in Artforum, Frieze, The New Yorker, Art in America, Title Magazine, among others.