September 17 – October 31, 2015 Opening reception: September 17, 6-8 pm
303 Gallery is pleased to present our fifth exhibition of new paintings by Maureen Gallace.
Quietly refining her practice over 20 years at the limits of painterly representation, Gallace’s recent works find her training her eye on the sea, translating the simultaneously calm and unnerving duality inhabiting the edges of the earth. Within these intimate vistas are a multitude of moments, a nearly filmic rendering of the ocean’s persistent pull. Evoked by means of a deliberate yet improvisational hand, Gallace’s graceful marks make it feel as though time spent looking at the ocean has been stretched spontaneously, waves frozen into a hesitance that can exist only in memory or its evocation. In Cloud on a Beach, the seascape materializes as broad color fields, with details punctuating the scene in capricious ellipses. The ocean trails off, it continues inside and outside the picture plane, allowing but one glimpse of the sublime and continuous never-ending.
Gallace’s subjects are not always so ephemeral. The brushwork in Storm is more blunt, the depiction more vivid and physical. Thirsty shrubs dot the foreground, terrestrial tethers in sublunary greens and yellows. A misty light suffuses the scene, one of tranquility before the charge of nature. A deep reverence for the sea exists alongside a casual sense of fraternity and awe. Pushing paint onto her panels in pointedly autonomous strokes, a kind of tapestry emerges, a way of recording an evanescent coexistence with our own surroundings. Gallace’s stark and simple titles exude a manner of acceptance and composure in the face of nature’s grandiloquence, and point to a conceptualist’s fascination with subtleties in the infinitely repeatable. Neither ocean nor painting can ever be the same twice.
Maureen Gallace has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at La Conservera, Murcia, Spain, 2011; The Art Institute of Chicago, 2006; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2004; Dallas Museum of Art, 2003; and Museum Schloss-Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany, 1996. Group shows in which she has participated include 'September 11', MoMA PS1, New York, 2011; Whitney Biennial 2010, New York; and 'Ideal Standard Life' at Spiral/Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, 1996. Gallace’s paintings are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Fondazione Di Vignola, Italy, among others.