NYAB Event - Mara Held Exhibition

Mara Held Exhibition

Garth Greenan Gallery

This event has ended.

Gary Snyder Gallery presents Mara Held, an exhibition of paintings. The exhibition is Held’s first in a New York gallery in over a decade. Nineteen of the artist’s delicately painted, intricately detailed works will be on view, all created during the past five years.

In her paintings, Held uses dense, opaque colors and freehand drawing to create a variety of dramatic surface effects. In works such as Hiroshige I (2009) and Ogee (2012), calligraphic lines and concentric, ribbon-like forms vibrate across the works’ surfaces, as if compelled by some electrical impulse. Held’s use of egg tempera, however, belies the discrete nature of these forms; its inherent cracks and blemishes lend her paintings an aura of timelessness. Although painted as recently as last year, they could be, just as easily, wall fragments from an old church or agitated, scumbled markings on some ancient rockface.

Born in New York, New York in 1954, Mara Held received an MA from Immaculate Heart College in 1979. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions in New York, Brooklyn, and Milan. In addition, her work has been in group exhibitions at many prestigious institutions, including: the Williamsburg Art & Historical Society (1998, Brooklyn), the Municipal Art Society of New York (2003), Saatchi and Saatchi (2003, New York), and The Painting Center (2008, New York). Most recently, Held’s work appeared in Splendor of Dynamic Structure: Celebrating 75 Years of the American Abstract Artists (January 13–February 25, 2011) at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

Held’s work is featured in numerous public and private collections, including: MTA Arts for Transit, New York; Bayerische Landesbank, New York; Landesbank Schleswig-‐ Holstein, New York; and the International Artists Museum, Tel Aviv.