NYAB Event - Annette Davidek Exhibition

Annette Davidek Exhibition

Littlejohn Contemporary

This event has ended.

Annette Davidek’s paintings of floating forms are derived from diagrams of plants, organic life forms— such as roots, branches, coral, chromosomes, capillaries, atoms and algae—as well as old technological illustrations. In her compositions, which are layered in thin applications of oil onto rectilinear birch plywood panels, her sometimes quirky, repetitive images randomly mutate. Some shapes flatten, darken and become almost silhouettes.

In many of the works florescent splays of color emerge from behind the flattened darker images. At times, the images are almost translucent like on a light-soaked field of a microscope. Distinctions blur. Opacity and luminosity, repulsion and attraction are concerns of the artist as well as tension and dissonance. Ghosted images vie with more clearly seen parts of the paintings. The captured, submerged and frozen images create a sense of depth and a record of her process.

The imagery’s ambiguous scale generates a micro- and a macroscopic interplay. Despite countless organic references, they remain abstract shapes repeated throughout the painted space as if suspended in solution. Her paintings evoke the experience of looking from tiptoe edge into a pool. Davidek creates surprising depth with extremely thin layers of paint, so thin that the wood appears stained. Her compositions seem as though they have been suddenly flooded with light to reveal the animated forms within.

Annette Davidek’s paintings personify processes of movement and growth in action as well as shape. Her syrupy lines often bleed, or dissolve, into the wood, and this fuzziness becomes a pictorial equivalent to energy. She employs repetition for a fundamental and formal purpose: mimicking the replication of development and the dynamic of movement while also being decorative. Her pattern paintings may recall Philip Taaffe and Terry Winters, but Davidek’s synthesis of pleasure and meaning stays entirely her own.