Sue Post, Barb Laube and Louisa Waber Exhibitions

The Painting Center

This event has ended.

The Painting Center presents Sue Post: Weed/ Garden and Barb Laube: First Beach in the Main Gallery and Louisa Waber: Recent Painting and Drawing in the Project Room.

Weed/Garden, an exhibition of recent paintings by Sue Post, follows the artist’s previous exhibition at the
gallery, Color Balance, in 2012. For over five years, Post’s work was based on an irregular grid or weave, a
“plaid” composed of three or four colors alternating between long and short rectangles. Each patch or strip
of color serves as part of two distinct vertical or horizontal structural elements, and every part hovers
between figure and ground. Over time, that grid was placed in a field rather than filling the entire surface,
and it began to act more like a noun than a verb. With Weed/Garden, the encumbrance of rules and
expectation is thrown off so that the work can grow wild.

The exhibition, First Beach, features the paintings of Barbara Laube. The subject of her paintings is James Island, which is the sacred burial ground of the Quileute nation, located on the reservation at First Beach. It is on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. As an adult returning to First Beach in 2014, Laube’s childhood and adulthood blended to create a trip laden with vulnerability. Each painting became an ancestor of her grandmother, mother, and father, speaking to her through color and light. Light has always been one of her central focuses. But the light in the trees on the island, in the Pacific Ocean, and in the rainforest, was vast and consummate, as if she were looking at infinity. This is the light that found it’s way onto the canvas. This series is two years of work for Laube that has been brewing for a lifetime.

The project room is dedicated to a display of Louisa Waber’s most recent paintings and work on paper. Resolute with both depth and vitality, examples of her abstract art have been noted for many years in exhibitions in New York, and can now be seen on their own together. Waber mentions Cezanne, Hofmann, de Kooning, and Guston, as a context of inspirers. But her current working mentality is also moved by Byzantine mosaics, and by geometry and architecture, a quality of airiness, and the moody industrial landscape seen from her studio window: old factories, the sky at a certain hour. Waber paints rhythm and light, a sense of being able to move in and out of the picture plane.

Her paintings are both direct and mysterious. As she paints, she says, she accepts that her paintings are working when they take on a voice of their own and she can respond to what they are saying. Every mark or stroke can exist only in the moment. The moment in the process cannot be repeated. Even after only five minutes, it becomes a different mark and a different painting.

Whether a painting is finished or not is often unclear to her - some paintings always want more. Others are more definitive, they practically shout, “done.” Sometimes she’ll leave a painting alone for weeks or months, and then revisit it once new possibilities reveal themselves. But that is the finished feeling of her works: possibility revealing itself.