Anne Buckwalter & Gretchen Scherer “Dual Hearts and Empty Halls”

Monya Rowe Gallery

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Monya Rowe Gallery presents a two-person exhibition featuring new paintings by Anne Buckwalter and Gretchen Scherer. Deserted halls, packed suitcases and home offices allude to the gravity of our current atmosphere, but Dual Hearts and Empty Halls is a playful exhibition that engages the viewers understanding of memory and space.
Anne Buckwalter’s paintings are an amalgamation of invented subject matter and elements mined from her own life. Buckwalter creates an ambiguous narrative by juxtaposing banal everyday objects, such as a chipped mug from Zabar’s, a laptop, or a favorite sweater, with more provocative or sinister objects. “Sort of like the feeling of being half-told a secret”, the artist says. In Sleepover (2021), Buckwalter depicts young sexuality amid elements that feel old-fashioned or are associated with domesticity, such as a lace doily, or a child’s toy. In Drift (2020) a fuchsia wig and a pair of stilettos rest in the snow, presumably abandoned from a wild night out, while nearby, a formal dining room chair, undermines the fleetingness of the moment.

Gretchen Scherer’s paintings of interiors are reimagined depictions of museums or historic privately-owned art collections. To create the works, Scherer relies on internet searches, books on interiors, and her imagination. Each museum depiction is subtly manipulated to include Scherer’s favorite paintings and sculptures carefully selected from the collection and reinterpreted as a Salon Style installation. Scherer lovingly scrutinizes a museum collection by envisioning it anew. For this exhibition, a painting inspired by the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome is bursting with masterworks painstakingly recreated in miniature form within a seemingly endless unpopulated hall. The artworks in these deserted rooms seem to come alive, and embody a life of their own. In Turner’s Studio at Petworth (2021), a once dark, grey room is envisioned with a magnificent ray of light shining on Turner’s sketches strewn about the floor. On Turner’s studio walls, Scherer cheekily hung masterworks from the Petworth House collection.

Anne Buckwalter (b. 1987, Lancaster, PA) received a MFA from Maine College of Art, Portland, ME and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Recent group exhibitions include Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Alexander Berggruen, NY; Monya Rowe Gallery, NY; and Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY. Buckwalter has completed residencies at Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. In 2021 she was awarded a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant and in 2016 a Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. The artist lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Gretchen Scherer (b. 1979, Indianapolis, IN) received a MFA from Hunter College, NY and a BFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago, IL. Residencies include Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, ME and Vermont Studio Center. Recent group exhibitions include Taymour Grahne Projects, London; 1969 Gallery, NY; and Monya Rowe Gallery, NY. Scherer will have her second solo exhibition at Monya Rowe Gallery in February 2022. Her work was selected by Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine for the recent New American Paintings Northeast Edition (2020). Scherer lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.