Edda Renouf @ Barbara Mathes Gallery, NYC - A Selection of Paintings and Drawings from 1976 – 2019

Edda Renouf: A Selection of Paintings and Drawings from 1976 – 2019 

Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York 

January 10 - March 17, 2023 

Barbara Mathes Gallery presents Edda Renouf: A Selection of Paintings and Drawings from 1976 – 2019, a comprehensive exhibition spanning more than forty years of the artist’s career. Presenting a wide range of Edda Renouf’s work, this exhibition will explore her commitment to meditative, lyrical abstraction and the experiments with process and material for which she is known.

Fascinated by the physical qualities of linen, Edda Renouf removes and repositions threads from the weave of her canvases before applying glazes of acrylic paint and sanding the paintings’ surfaces. The process of altering the canvas reveals the inherent structure of the support, rendering it not simply a ground onto which an image is imposed, but rather an integral element of the composition itself. In Sign X, Monte Alban, Oaxaca (2007), for example, the removed and reapplied threads form a textured monochrome grid with undulating horizontals. Named after Monte Alban, in Oaxaca – a pre-Colombian archeological site – this work juxtaposes organic curves reminiscent of the region’s mountain landscape with the horizontal-vertical structure of the linen canvas that recalls the geometry of pre-Columbian pyramids. In Goldfinch I (2019) the repositioned canvas threads create uneven triangular shapes arranged in a simple linear pattern evoking a musical score. The play of positive and negative spaces within the composition emphasizes the artist’s sensitivity to sound as she removes and reapplies threads from the linen canvas, thus revealing its life and energy.

Material and process are equally central to Edda Renouf’s dramatic, tactile works on paper. As in her paintings, she explores the physical properties of her material, often incising her paper to remove fibers, leaving a delicate burr along the lines. In Primal Energy 20 – Earth Sounds (1989) a black rectangular form glows with sharp red lines that result from layers of oil pastel finely scraped to reveal the underlying color. Radiating from this central form are incisions in the paper itself, created by using an etching point and carefully filled with black ink.

Born in 1943 in Mexico, EDDA RENOUF came to the United States in 1957. After completing her B.A. at Sarah Lawrence College, she studied in New York, Paris, and Munich before returning to the United States to receive her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work is held in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Pompidou; and the British Museum. Major museum exhibitions have included a 1997 retrospective at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Revealed Structures, a 2004 exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Edda Renouf lives and works in Connecticut together with her husband, the composer, Alain Middleton.

BARBARA MATHES GALLERY

22 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.barbaramathesgallery.com

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018 @ Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018

Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

April 26 - July 1, 2022

Barbara Mathes Gallery presents Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018. Featuring works by Ed Clark, Thomas Downing, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Charles Hinman and Kenneth Noland, the exhibition explores the history of the Color Field movement and its legacy in the 21st Century. From the 1960s onwards, a generation of American artists began to rethink postwar gestural abstraction. Retaining an interest in color, artists such as Ed Clark, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing began to experiment with framing and shaped canvases, while Sam Gilliam and Charles Hinman abandoned the traditional frame altogether, breaking the boundaries between the space of the painting and the space of the viewer. Driven by technical innovation, the artists presented here expand the definitions of their medium while exploring the effects of light and luminous color.

Experimentation with color and the question of the frame were central concerns of Ed Clark. In the 1960s Clark became the first artist to exhibit a shaped canvas which appeared in a group exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York. Ed Clark was already known for his rethinking of gestural abstraction: in the 1950s he began to apply paint with a push broom, a technique he termed “the big sweep.” In Untitled (1996) Ed Clark reinterprets the oval forms that had preoccupied him in his early canvases, presenting curved shapes not as virtuosic brushstrokes, but rather as glowing clouds of atmospheric color.

Ceaseless invention is a hallmark of Sam Gilliam’s career. In his canonical Drape series, begun in 1968, he suspended unstretched canvases from the walls and ceiling. Freeing the canvas from its frame allowed Gilliam to push the boundaries between painting and sculpture while establishing the artist as leading innovator in the Color Field movement. In B Series II (2015) Gilliam uses pigment-based ink on handmade paper, manipulating the material to create sharp vertical folds within which the luminous pigment pools and smears. Gilliam cites Jazz as an influence and the tension between improvisation and structure –between the ink’s liquidity and the linear structure of the paper’s folds—is characteristic of his experiments with media.

The picture frame was of equal interest to Kenneth Noland, an artist who defined the “post-painterly abstraction” of a generation that reacted against the gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism. A key member of the Washington Color School, Kenneth Noland reduced his compositions to geometric shapes such as circles, chevrons, and lines which he painted on unprimed canvases. Through these simple forms he explored geometry and color relationships. In Walk (1964) he plays with the limits of the frame – turning the painting on its side and both echoing and mirroring its corners in spare ninety-degree angles.

BARBARA MATHES GALLERY

22 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.barbaramathesgallery.com

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