Release Issued by Nokia:

Imirage n a marriage of image and mirage

SPONSORED BY NOKIA with support from EPSON.

Opening at the Arndean Gallery in London’s Cork Street on October 17, Imirage presents a unique, entirely new artform. Jeffrey Kroll has developed a marriage of mobile phone photography and painting which is completely without precedent and takes printmaking in the painterly tradition into the 21st century.

Jeffrey Kroll is known and collected for his luminous, painterly abstract paintings. He is very much wedded to paint as a medium, although he began exploiting digital print technology several years ago. He started experimenting with a Nokia camera phone last summer, and has used it to marry two mediums – the digital photograph and hand-applied paint, to create truly extraordinary and groundbreaking paintings.

Jeffrey first paints one of his signature abstract canvases. He then photographs it using a state of the art Nokia N90 camera phone. The photograph is then printed onto canvas on a massive scale, using the latest EPSON large-format graphic printer. Jeffrey further embellishes and elaborates on the image with paint, to flesh out the composition. The end result is a subtle and deceptive interaction of painted space and digital space; a fusion of monoscopic space from the eye of the camera and stereoscopic space from the eyes of the painter.

Acclaimed American printmaker, Ken Tyler, who worked with artists from Lichtenstein to Hockney and has been recently exhibited at Tate Liverpool and Tate Modern, was quoted recently in RA Magazine:

'The marriage of new technology and ideas with art techniques ancient as civilisation itself (i.e. drawing). This is a dichotomy ideal for fine art printmaking and artistic collaborations. The art business isn't doing enough to celebrate and combine the technology of digital imagery with the power of the human hand. Yet there are great possibilities, maybe even the greatest artistic opportunities in printmaking lie ahead.'

The completed paintings express profound colour, translucency and form, works of art that carry the time-honoured tradition of the etchings and prints into the 21st century, and transform it.

New York born Kroll is based in California and Stratford-upon-Avon. His work is widely collected – collectors include film director Francis Veber and the de Rothschild family as well as many corporate collections. His paintings have been described by Tatler as 'extraordinary and beautiful' and by The Times as 'striking, colourful and rather beautiful.' His work has been shown in spaces as diverse as the windows of Harrods in Knightsbridge and the galleries of the Louvre in Paris.

The flagship camera product in Nokia's newly launched Nokia Nseries range of high performance multimedia devices, the new Nokia N90 is set to revolutionize the mobile photography market. It is the first mobile device to feature superior Carl Zeiss optics in addition to a range of advanced camera functions, including a 2 megapixel camera with autofocus and 20x digital zoom, integrated flash, macro mode for sharp close-ups and high quality video capture and on device editing.

Further information is available on www.imirage.co.uk