Maureen Gallace Exhibition
303 Gallery (507 W 24th St.)
This event has ended.
Quietly refining her practice over 20 years at the limits of painterly representation, Gallace’s recent works find her training her eye on the sea, translating the simultaneously calm and unnerving duality inhabiting the edges of the earth. Within these intimate vistas are a multitude of moments, a nearly filmic rendering of the ocean’s persistent pull. Evoked by means of a deliberate yet improvisational hand, Gallace’s graceful marks make it feel as though time spent looking at the ocean has been stretched spontaneously, waves frozen into a hesitance that can exist only in memory or its evocation. In July 4th, the seascape materializes as broad color fields, with details punctuating the scene in capricious ellipses. The ocean trails off, it continues inside and outside the picture plane, allowing but one glimpse of the sublime and continuous neverending.
Gallace’s subjects are not always so ephemeral. The brushwork in Storm is more blunt, the depiction more vivid and physical. Thirsty shrubs dot the foreground, terrestrial tethers in sublunary greens and yellows. A misty light suffuses the scene, one of tranquility before the charge of nature. A deep reverence for the sea exists alongside a casual sense of fraternity and awe. Pushing paint onto her panels in pointedly autonomous strokes, a kind of tapestry emerges, a way of recording an evanescent coexistence with our own surroundings. Gallace’s stark and simple titles exude a manner of acceptance and composure in the face of nature’s grandiloquence, and point to a conceptualist’s fascination with subtleties in the infinitely repeatable. Neither ocean nor painting can ever be the same twice.
Media
Schedule
from September 17, 2015 to October 31, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-17 from 18:00 to 20:00