NYAB Event - Denise Green "Wonder & Evanescence"

Denise Green "Wonder & Evanescence"

Sundaram Tagore Gallery

This event has ended.

For her first solo exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery New York, Australian-American artist Denise Green, who studied under Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, applies Indian and Aboriginal philosophy to modernist technique, composing deeply personal works. Disembodied objects such as cut roses, fan-like shapes and stone fragments hover in the center of her mixed-media paintings and works on paper. Yet, the objects are not to be read literally, nor do they bear specific meaning. Rather they are derived from a bank of personal and cultural imagery. The images are a direct extension of the artist’s inner world and allude to her experiences with loss, grief and the transience of life.

The selection of works in this exhibition are informed by the linguistic term metonymy. Green explains: “Metonymic thinking implies for me the fusion of an inner spiritual and an outer material world. When an artist creates metonymically the artwork is seamless.” In a metonymic framework, a sign or symbol does not have one single meaning, rather it has a more fluid, holistic meaning. There is a breakdown of dualities, such as spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, or past and future. Instead, these oppositions become part of one seamless continuum.

Rather than relying solely on a formalist approach to painting, Green enters the metonymic cognitive mode. Her rose triptychs, for instance, are metonymically connected to her state of mind. The body of work emerged in response to her mother’s death. While grieving, Green found she was drawn to roses as they triggered her memory of her mother as a gardener and the transience of life. She began to repeat the image of a cut rose in her work intensifying the color with each permutation of the motif. Using layers of acrylic paint combined with pencil, chalk, wax, and marble dust, Green built nuanced environments in which she placed the syncopated forms. Elusively rendered, the cut flowers are flattened and reduced to their essence. The images are ethereal and evoke memories projected on the screen of the mind. As is the case with all of Green’s works, a narrative is implied but one that is non-linear and abstract. Multivalent and challenging, Green’s work gives new meaning to the notion of globalization in art.

Media

• Painting
• Other

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