NYAB Event - Mari Lyons “Floating Palettes”

Mari Lyons “Floating Palettes”

First Street Gallery

This event has ended.

In her new show, FLOATING PALETTES and other recent work, Mari Lyons borrows an image, a sign, from the late, magical studio paintings of Georges Braque — with a nod, too, to the floating world of the Japanese Ukiyo-e print. In Braque’s metaphysical studio interiors, objects are transformed into towering events over which palette and bird float. He reinvents perceptual space.

Lyons, in her interiors, uses objects, some real some imagined, to explore (for her) new spaces. Some of these objects, subjects, are an Ibibio sculpture (which she has nicknamed “Geraldine”), a carousel horse (the subject of many of her earlier paintings), an African rooster, a wooden copy of an eighteenth-century angel, casts from the ancient Greek, and all the paraphernalia-paints, brushes, paintings, vases, bottles, easels-things that inhabit a painter’s studio. In these, she mediates on the ever floating and forming language of painting in the dramatic world of the studio.

“In these works,” says Lyons, “some more objective, some more subjective. I have sometimes used the language of abstraction. All works in this show are an attempt to anchor ‘floating space’ into a bold celebration of the act of painting.”

Media

• Painting

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