NYAB Event - “The Language of Painting” Exhibition

“The Language of Painting” Exhibition

Lesley Heller Workspace

This event has ended.

All painters say that their work is about light, line, form, and color. But there are many other artists who don’t paint, who have co-opted the same language to create vocabularies entirely their own. Those included in The Language of Painting use non-traditional materials to re-combine painterly concerns idiosyncratically, carrying the principles of picture-making into their artwork.

None of these artists would be able to do their work in other eras, when commercial materials, affordable power tools, and contemporary technology didn’t exist. Their use of today’s keyed up hues demonstrate how these materials have transformed our world into a burst of color. The use of industrial elements offers freedom from painting and its history, giving a playful quality to the work.

Martha Clippinger’s painted wooden sculptures reference painting, minimalism, and architecture. Their placement anywhere but on the wall underscores that her work comes from painting, but is not part of it.

Katherine Daniels melds the shapes, colors, and reflective surfaces of different sizes of beads into complex wall pieces and sculptures.

Vicki DaSilva’s time-release nighttime photographs of colored fluorescent lights moving through carefully-selected outdoor settings create dynamic, dreamlike tableaus that are, in effect, paintings made through photography.

Anne Ferrer inflates brightly colored parachute fabrics into billowing forms.

Joan Grubin uses strips of paper as a source of light. By placing them away from the wall, the florescent paint on the back sidecasts a soft glow.

Lynne Harlow works in a language of reductive abstraction to produce her sculpture.

Doreen McCarthy molds and twists lenticular plastic into three-dimensional forms, playing with material shifts and changes of color and depth.

Gelah Penn exploits the various thickness and hues of commercially produced nylon fishing line to create colored drawings projecting into space.

Carol Salmanson combines industrial materials such as LEDS, electronic components, plastic, and wires, creating an atmosphere that is both ethereal and mysterious.

Empowered by the explosion of technological innovations, each has created a unique vocabulary which not only comes from painting, but adds new dimensions to the language of contemporary art.