Past
Mika Obayashi, What Is Sacred
Celia Jailer, Nothing Holds
Ben Lotka, Floor Objects
Leo Brooks, Fireworks
Ben Lotka, Low Relief
To Know Blue as Blue
20 September - 1 November 2025
5U Space is pleased to announce its sixth exhibition, Scott Vradelis, To Know Blue as Blue. This installation is the artist’s first presentation at the gallery and second solo exhibition in Philadelphia.
The site-specific work features sensitive concentrations of blue pigment on dibond panels and directly on the gallery walls. Natural light combines with the multi-layered application to create an immersive experience that eludes narrative as forms bounce and flow from the gallery space to the viewer and back. Vradelis’s bold and placid paint applications intensify through duration to produce an effect that the artist hopes will lead each of us beyond looking and thinking to feeling and knowing.
Checklist
Blue is used because blue seems to be edgeless, either brightening or darkening, always moving from one to the other, then back.
It somehow causes a chord in the body to be moved.
Consider blue, the space, the form, the surface, the marks, the relative scale.
Can those things be experienced outside the tangle of language and story?
There’s a bench for you to sit.
Please enjoy!
Scott Vradelis
September 2025
Scott Vradelis (b.1959) lives and works in Elkins Park, PA. He earned his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. In 1986 he received a grant for travel in Europe to study painting. Upon returning, he relocated to New York where he began showing work in group exhibitions in Manhattan, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Lorient, France, including a solo exhibition at Philippe Briet Gallery in New York, NY (1994).
Vradelis stopped painting in 2000 to build a business and raise a family with his partner, Catherine. Since his return to painting over a decade later, he has shown his work in a solo exhibition at The DaVinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia, PA (2022), and group exhibitions in Drawing Rooms, Jersey City, NJ (2024); Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2024); and most recently at 57W57, New York, NY (2025).
svradelis.com