NYAB Event - Mary Weatherford “Red Hook”

Mary Weatherford “Red Hook”

Brennan & Griffin (Red Hook)

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Brennan & Griffin presents Red Hook, a new suite of paintings by Mary Weatherford. The series inaugurates the gallery’s new 5000-square-foot exhibition space at 62 Delavan Street, a former metal castings storehouse for Progress Machine Works.

For this exhibition, Weatherford builds upon her interest in the American landscape, which has provided an array of subjects and the underlying context for her previous paintings. In recent years, Weatherford has addressed subjects ranging from a sea cave on Pismo Beach to the metropolises of Los Angeles and New York City. Through a process of observation and examination, the artist mines the historical, cultural, and aesthetic substance that underlie each chosen subject. Weatherford draws on, and seamlessly integrates, an array of influences into the development of each new body of work.

The Red Hook paintings expand upon Weatherford’s recent engagement with New York City and its surroundings, explored in bodies of work entitled Manhattan and Coney Island. Here, the focus drifts to New York Harbor, its waterways, and the history of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Due to its unique geography (at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers) and proximity to the southern tip of Manhattan, Red Hook served as the industrial and mercantile backbone for the City of New York. Established in 1636, it was once the busiest freight port in the world. Red Hook and New York Harbor provide the vantage points from which Weatherford views the city past and present, and subsequently, its relationship to the broader American narrative.

The harbor is reflected through the artist’s utilization of linen as a register of motion and in her watery, sometimes brackish applications of pigment. Monumental in scale and scope, Weatherford’s painted atmospheres call to mind the sun-dappled clarity of a bright morning, the nocturnal saturnalia o! f turbulent waters, the brooding specter of storm. They reflect high noon, dusk, night, dawn. Paint eddies, roils and swirls under neon strips, as if illuminated by the city lights. This suite of paintings seeks to unify the physical character of place with the passage of time, to adumbrate the manifold histories of the harbor, and its role as witness to and participant in New York City’s fitful evolution.

This is Mary Weatherford’s third exhibition with Brennan & Griffin. Her paintings have been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California; LAXART, Los Angeles; Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield, California; and MoMA PS 1, New York. Her neon paintings were recently featured in the group exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, curated by Laura Hoptman, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and are currently on view! in Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler, curated by Katy Siegel, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.