For the Art Show 2015, 303 Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Maureen Gallace.
For two decades, Maureen Gallace’s practice has taken up an exclusively regional subject matter as an exercise in the reconciliation between abstraction and representation. In her paintings, the coastal New England countryside is rendered with marks at once expressive and concise, improvisational and economical. Seaside houses and beach shacks are reduced to geometric abstraction and iconography, while simultaneously capturing the emotional charge of locality and retreat. Extending formal tenets introduced by Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter, and other artists of the early to mid-20th century, her paintings propose a middle ground between the conceptual rigor of repetition and the communicative potential of expressionism.
In a new body of work, Gallace has chosen to focus exclusively on seascapes, letting her deceptively loose brushwork replicate the ocean's ceaseless and indefinable magnetism. These coastal scenes, representations of a certain freedom and unspoiled allure, are rendered with calculated and poignant spontaneity. This extemporization imbues a compelling sense of life and movement into her work, an echo of the mesmerizing glow of these wild and pristine littoral landscapes. Never simply beautiful or banal, the premonitory power of the coast itself pervades Gallace's paintings, while her stark and simple titles ('Storm', 'October', 'July 4th') lend the work a notion of seriality. The paintings become types of windows or conduits, in a subtly gestural allusion to the continual pull and mystery of these veritable ends of the earth.
Maureen Gallace has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; La Conservera, Murcia, Spain; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; and 303 Gallery, New York. Gallace’s next solo show opens in September at 303 Gallery.