LA14 - Nancy Haynes, Erin Lawlor

NANCY HAYNES

recent paintings

October 10 – November 10, 2012

reception Saturday, October 13, 5:00–8:00 PM

NANCY HAYNES
Referent For Departure, 2012 (cat. no. NAH14)
oil on linen
18.5 x 21.5 in.

For our 14th exhibition in Los Angeles, we showcase in the front gallery recent work by esteemed New York painter Nancy Haynes. Haynes' career spans four decades and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including two NEA grants. She has shown in museums around the country, including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum in New York, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, and the Harvard University Art Museums. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery. This is her second solo with us. Of her last show, critic Kenneth Baker wrote, "I think of her position as somewhat parallel to Mary Heilmann a decade ago: regarded by colleagues as a standard-bearer of the artistic life, yet little known outside a circuit of fellow professionals and collectors." Just how little-known depends on who you talk to. It is hard to find a serious painter of my generation who doesn't admire Haynes' accomplishment. She has convincingly extended forward into the current moment, something perennial at the root of post-war painting's aspiration. A younger generation, rediscovering the power of the slow reveal, will find inspiration in Haynes' ethic and her means. The challenge with work based on color and light is to preserve the substance, the body wrapped around the spirit, yet Haynes manages to stay firmly grounded. Descriptors we tend not to associate together, such as radiant and earthen, seem aptly paired. Haynes' melding of intellectual rigor and meditative abandon keeps her painting in abeyance, and reveals her image not only slowly, but sustainably. ERIN LAWLOR recent paintings October 10 – November 10, 2012 reception Saturday, October 13, 5:00–8:00 PM ERIN LAWLOR untitled, 2012 (cat. no. ERL17) oil on linen 39.5 x 32 in. In the middle gallery we present a selection of recent paintings by British-born artist Erin Lawlor, who has been living and working in France since 1987. Her work has been exhibited in London, Brussels, Paris and more recently in San Francisco; this is her first solo in Los Angeles. Lawlor's work is characterized by wide, fluid marking, closely-valued, tertiary colors, and matte, light-absorbing surfaces. Although her process involves discipline and self-editing, her painting seems effortlessly suspended, at once turgid and poised. In her own words, she is fascinated by "the small miracle of the way in which painting, in one stroke of the paintbrush and paint, can constitute all at once both space, volume, shape and time." She has synthesized much of the international diaspora of gestural painting (American Abstract Expressionism, in particular Kline and Rothko; the Sumi-inspired aspects of the Japanese Gutai movement such as Kazuo Shiraga, and the French Tachists such as Pierre Soulages come to mind) but with a release of the stress associated with these examples. The undulation between convexity and concavity in Lawlor's color-space recalls the natural rhythm of breathing. These are open images. The juxtaposition of these two artists this month sets up a serendipitous exchange about painting's adeptness at shedding light on the darker end of the chromatic spectrum, and the articulate range of touch.