NYAB Event - Ann Schaumburger "New Work"

Ann Schaumburger "New Work"

A.I.R. Gallery

This event has ended.

A.I.R. Gallery announces an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Schaumburger.

Mario Naves writes in the essay for the exhibition: “Compositional rigor and chromatic exuberance have always been hallmarks of Ann Schaumburger’s art, but in her recent paintings, they’ve taken on a renewed urgency.

The house continues to be Schaumburger’s structural arbiter. As both symbol and support—Schaumburger paints on shaped panels reminiscent of a child’s rendering of home: a rectangle with a pitched roof—it offers a foundation, readymade but not taken for granted, on which to explore pictorial form. Each “house” is divided into three sections; inside these divisions, Schaumburger fits fractured designs, radically condensed images—emblems, really—and startling
turns of color. Ornamentation powers the pictures as does a newfound interplay between figure and ground.

Schaumburger’s paintings are punctuated by dreamy, toy-like dioramas of isolated boats, moons and trees. The results are High Modern in their elegance, but there’s also something of the folk artist’s unaffected charm in, Light Green Topiary House and the wistful Summer Night Versailles (both 2009).

But it is Schaumburger’s gift for color—the ability to hone in and expand on its allusive possibilities—that sets the work apart. Luminescent greens, sour yellows, milky grays, musky pinkish-purples and the rare, astringent white are employed with uncanny surety. The best colorists turn our heads by convincing us that we haven’t truly experienced color before.
Schaumburger is a member of that select group and her paintings are bracing and welcome cases in point.”