NYAB Event - Anoka Faruqee “Future Perfect”

Anoka Faruqee “Future Perfect”

Koenig & Clinton

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Koenig & Clinton presents Future Perfect, Anoka Faruqee’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. Recent works from the artist’s ongoing series of Moiré Paintings foreground the début of two new series: the Circle Paintings and the Wave Paintings. By triangulating all three bodies of work Faruqee galvanizes her systematic experimentation with color, perception, and the limits of technological precision. Her simultaneous shift towards larger-scale canvases intensifies the somatic experience of varying retinal patterns.

Faruqee manually conjures the generative principle of interference, as expressed in wave formations, magnetic fields, and computer screens, by employing a wide range of customized trowels. Layer by layer, the artist rakes one selected paint color over the canvas and then later sands the dry surface to erase all resulting grooves and ridges before raking the next set of overlapping lines. Each painting offers evidence of a physical act suspended in the strata of pattern, capturing a momentary glitch that might otherwise pass undetected.

Through carefully layering offset circles Faruqee generates the radiant shimmer of pulsating rings of the Circle Paintings. Similarly, the Wave Paintings, developed in conversation with painter David Driscoll, summon the appearance of topological folds through a precise overlapping of curves. A deceptively voluminous bunching recalls the organic distortion of underwater shadows or light bouncing off of gathered fabric. Akin to a Fibonacci sequence, mathematical accuracy quietly underpins ‘natural’ shape.

While traces of the artist’s hand are obscured through this process, brief interjections of accident re-introduce gesture: irregular edges form around oozing paint; uneven pulls give way to color bleed and smudging. In a nod to the experimental legacies of both Josef Albers and John Cage alike, Faruqee has devised a tightly controlled system of production that embraces the intervention of randomness.

While the paintings in Future Perfect are informed by patterns that existed long before the digital age, Faruqee’s paintings remind us of their ubiquitous presence within it. Intentionally approximating the space of a screen, resonance is filtered through the material of paint, and that medium’s inextricable relation to physical action. Indeed, the interstices between the mechanical, the digital and the handmade are precisely where Faruqee dwells.

Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972, Ann Arbor) earned her M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her B.A., Painting from Yale University in 1994. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad at venues including: MoMA/PS1, Long Island City, NY; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA; among others. Currently, Faruqee is an associate professor at the Yale School of Art. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, CT.

[Image: Anoka Faruqee “2013P-83 (Wave)” (2013) acrylic on linen on panel, 45 x 45 in (114.3 x 114.3 cm)]