November 6 through November 28, 2015
Foreword by Darby Bannard / Show List / artcritical.com
Alexander/Heath Contemporary is pleased
to announce an exhibition
of recent work by Painter Ann Walsh.
Images from November 6, 2015 Artist Reception
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ann Walsh has lived and worked in New York City since 1980. She has had numerous one-person and group exhibitions, including exhibitions at Greenberg Wilson Fine Art, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Cecilia de Torres, Art Basel Miami Beach, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Cambridge University, UK, The Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, The Alexander Brest Museum, Jacksonville, Florida, Stonybrook University, NY, the Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon, Waddington & Shiell, Toronto and The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY.
Her work is held in numerous public and corporate collections, and includes the Collections at Cambridge University, UK, Portland Museum of Art, IBM, Citibank, The Everson, Mutual of New York, Banker’s Trust, Bank of America, Portland Museum of Art, Continental Insurance, Aetna, Price Waterhouse, Hyatt Hotels, Hilton Hotels & Resorts and JP Morgan Chase, among others.
Ann Walsh continues to explore the fundamentals of painting through her consideration of materials, formats and dimensionality. Walsh’s innovations with materials, along with her abilities as a colorist, have kept her focused on what she considers the “directness of picture-making.”
After exploring a technique she developed of making paintings by pouring colored paint in reverse during the 1980’s, Walsh’s focus has been on creating freestanding and three-dimensional paintings consisting of simple nested bands of saturated, high key color.
Walsh initially painted her two and three-dimensional pictures, constructing them with poured handmade sheets of color, but beginning in 2003 she started using industrial pre-colored vinyl as a more direct way to explore color relationships. Walsh thinks of the vinyl as a pre-poured color, an easier, commercially available source of color than her own similarly poured sheets.
In the studio she selects three or four colors and arranges them in simple yet exacting compositions. Through trial and error she determines the layout and proportions of the color during the drawing phase of her work. Never ordering her forms in perfect ratios, she adjusts their lucid proportions until they “work.” Their smooth surfaces and geometric aspects naturally compel us to seek order within them, and as we do so, we become aware of how the widths of color are not precisely ordered and of the emotive and spatial suggestions of their subtle interactions and considered placements.
In finding combinations that are satisfying and that yet violate a perfect sense of order, Walsh strives for a non-objective completeness, surprise and a kind of rigorous delight. When the pictures work and why they work fascinates her. When seen side by side or in groups, where there is a chance to see and compare them individually, their differences and each one’s inimitability become readily apparent.
This is not accidental; Walsh is driven to do something in each work that she hasn’t done previously. If she’s seen or done something before and it’s become familiar, it’s no longer interesting to her. “There’s an emotive visual pleasure to be found in the colors and placements” she says, echoing her friend, the critic Clement Greenberg, who stated, “Feeling is all.” (1952)
ANN WALSH
New York, NY
Artist website: Ann-Walsh.com