Emily Nelligan “A Memorial Exhibition”

Alexandre Gallery

[Image: Emily Nelligan "23 SEPT 05, 2005" charcoal on paper, 7 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.]

This event has ended.

A survey of forty charcoal landscape drawings from the past thirty years, marking the gallery’s sixth show of Nelligan’s work, and the first since the artist’s death last year at the age of 94.

Reclusive and private by nature, Nelligan made drawings for herself, rarely exhibiting and avoiding attention of any kind. Known only to a small circle of artist friends and colleagues, she exchanged or gave works to people such as Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Hilton Kramer, Norma Marin, Richard Pousette-Dart and Meyer Shapiro. Such was her world until 2000 when the Bowdoin College Museum presented a summer exhibition of Nelligan’s drawings. The show received a New York Times review, with excerpts as follows, and brought her national attention:

Emily Nelligan’s charcoal drawings are almost all the same size: 10 inches wide by 7 inches high. Some are dark as a moonless night, some pale as fog. They all depict the same landscape: Great Cranberry Island, the southwest of Mount Desert Island in Maine… . In their minimal steel frames, they hang like sudden windows: instants of light and air translated into black and white.

If Ms. Nelligan’s subject is the moment in its infinite variability, she also draws permanence: a summer place apart from chronology, where time is measured by seasons, tides and changing light.