Ann Schaumburger “New Work”

A.I.R. Gallery

[Image: Ann Schaumburger "Orange House" (2020) Flashe on wood, 18 x 24 in.]

This event has ended.

I employ house shapes as scaffolding for playing with color. The visual twists and turns that a color makes in relationship to another color hold immense appeal to me. I love using repetition to make colors syncopate, jump, and dance.

— Ann Schaumburger, 2021

A.I.R. Gallery presents New Work, an exhibition of recent paintings by Ann Schaumburger that use repetition to explore color and perception.

Since the early 1970s, Schaumburger has been preoccupied with the simple structure of the gable roofed house, a familiar visual shorthand for home and frequent subject of children’s drawings. Her recent paintings on wood panel borrow their compositions from the shapes of tin miners’ stone houses in Cornwall, England and prefabricated metal sheds in Amherst, Virginia. Breaking down the gabled house’s geometric planes into smaller triangles, squares, and rectangles, Schaumburger uses Flashe and Polycolor vinyl paint to fill these shapes with dazzling color.

Defined by self-imposed constraints, Schaumburger’s aesthetic vocabulary yields a surprisingly varied range of expression. She begins by selecting just four colors and placing them together in a grid. Methodically repeating this exercise, she determines the specific juxtapositions of color from which each painting will develop , isolating the planes of both house and landscape into individual contrasting gridded schemes. The grid shifts in scale and proportion from plane to plane and work to work.

Schaumburger’s process is intuitive, based not on theory but guided instead by what she sees before her as she works. The paintings included in this exhibition emerged from an unexpected mix of neutral earth tones of brown, red, purple, and green and luminous shades of yellow, blue, orange, and pink. The works’ repeated geometry and bold tonal contrasts together provide an illusion of movement, an unresolvable perceptual tension between foreground and background, house and landscape.

Ann Schaumburger has shown extensively in New York City and internationally. Her work has been featured at the New York Public Library; The Museum of American Illustration, New York, NY; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France; and Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, NY. Schaumburger has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Centre d’Art i Natura in Spain, Brisons Veor in England, and the Ossabaw Island Project, Savannah, Georgia. She has completed several public commissions, most notably Urban Oasis, seventeen mosaic friezes permanently installed at the Fifth Avenue/59th Street subway station for the New York City MTA Arts and Design Program. www.annschaumburger.com