NYAB Event - Judith Dolnick “Paintings” & Lucy Mink “comes in the moment so please stay in touch”

Judith Dolnick “Paintings” & Lucy Mink “comes in the moment so please stay in touch”

OUTLET

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OUTLET FINE ART presents two solo exhibitions featuring the work of two painters: Judith Dolnick: Paintings and Lucy Mink: comes in the moment so please stay in touch. This exhibition marks the first one-person exhibition of the work of octogenarian Judith Dolnick in New York in nearly three decades and features the first solo exhibition in New York by emerging painter, Lucy Mink.

It has been nearly 30 years since Judith Dolnick has exhibited her lush paintings in New York. Her career began as a tough young artist living on North Wells Street in Chicago in the 1950’s. Dolnick along with Robert Natkin, Gerald van de Wiele, and Ann Mattingly opened the Wells Street Gallery, as a reaction to the lack of opportunities to exhibit the expressionistic paintings they were making at the time. While the struggling folk singer Odetta rehearsed upstairs, Dolnick and her crew created what critic Max Kozloff called “an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town.” The Wells Street Gallery is credited for giving the sculptor John Chamberlain his first solo exhibition. When Dolnick moved to New York City in 1959 she began exhibiting alongside such seminal abstract artists as Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Franz Kline at the prestigious Ellie Poindexter Gallery. In the 1980s she was represented by Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery. Her last solo exhibition was held there in 1987 and was reviewed by Michael Brenson in The New York Times who called her work the answer to “Matisse, Kandinsky and Dufy.”

Dolnick is most influenced by expressionism, and her works pay homage to Van Gogh (with whom she shares a birthday), Gauguin, and Redon. Except for the slight pull of nostalgia, Dolnick’s nonfigurative paintings are without a hint of gravity. Her seemingly endless expression of color is spontaneous and intuitive. In a mode of receptive reverie, Dolnick offers a surreal world dense with bucolic, ambiguous and semi-familiar shapes that suggest landscapes through scattered pulses of paint. Rhythm and gesture play a critical role in the process of Dolnick’s work, a process she has continued to develop despite of her absence from the New York art world. This selection of paintings are like bright daydream fantasies.
Judith Dolnick (b.1934) graduated from Stanford University and studied art in Chicago. Recent group exhibitions include To be a Lady: forty-five women in the arts, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, NY (‘12); Arshile Gorky and a selection of contemporary drawings, Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY (‘14); The Wells Street Gallery Revisited, Lesley Helley Workspace (’12). Solo exhibitions include Well Street Gallery, Chicago, IL (’57, ’58, ’59), Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY (’76), Hoshour Gallery, Albuquerque, NM (’79); Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, New York, NY (’83, ’87). Dolnick’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The Mint Museum of Art, Mint, Charlotte, NC and The Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS to name a few. Dolnick lives and works in Connecticut.

Lucy Mink borrows stylistically from a Futurist intention and a Cubist vision in her paintings that express the individual in a modern world. No so unlike the pioneering abstractions of Sonia Delaunay, Mink’s canvases rely on strong combinations of color and form that layer, juxtapose and weave a unique kind of naturalism—a visual diary of Mink’s daily life.

A central image is the raw anatomy in her many of paintings. A narrative pulled inward through a concentration of details where shards of color breakdown into stippled dots, patterns and stripes. In lieu of any outward reference to a subject, Mink offers a paradoxical echoing of organic forms that are consciously built up with architectonic volumes and planes, foreground and background, objective and spectral.

With her studio tucked into the rural landscape of Central New Hampshire, nature plays an important part not only in the color and composition of the paintings but also in the speed and pace of her paintings. This pace imparts a kind-of restraint and brings a sustained poetic coherence to all her work. Although her work draws inspiration from nature and physical atmosphere, life always seeps in—people play an active role in her process as well.
“I am consumed by combinations of color and form as a visual abstract diary of my life,” Mink explains, “where time does not belong to me, but to others. I am frequently organizing their things while they dance. I am in a situation.” –Lucy Mink

Lucy Mink (b.1968) received her MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY (‘15), Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, St. Louis, MO (‘15), Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA (’14) and Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn (’14). Her first one-person exhibition was held at Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT (’14). She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (‘12). Mink lives and works in Contoocook, NH.