NEW YORK, NY.- Gary Snyder Project Space presents the exhibition, Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings, opening February 10th, 2011, and continuing through April 2nd, 2011. Fendrich’s work is the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Sense and Sensation: Laurie Fendrich, Paintings and Drawings 1990-2010, which was organized and presented by the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, in Claremont, CA, October – December, 2010. The exhibition—which will travel to the Montana Museum of Art and Culture at The University of Montana in Missoula later this spring—is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay on the artist by renowned art critic Mark Stevens (whose biography of Willem de Kooning, co-written with his wife, Annalyn Swan, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008). The catalogue also contains an extensive -moreinterview with Fendrich by Geoform.net editor Julie Karabenick, together with full-page, fullcolor reproductions of each work of art in the exhibition.
Fendrich’s new paintings at GARY SNYDER Project Space continue and advance the trajectory of her idiosyncratic abstraction, which she develops intuitively but deliberately, through multiple layers of glazed oil colors. The paintings’ fusion of angular and rounded shapes is frequently interrupted by occasional small, floating ovals or circles. Although adamantly abstract, the organic curves and shapes whimsically and subtly suggest the presence of people and animals. With surprising juxtapositions of color, combined with complex grays, muted greens and dark browns, the artist achieves unusual harmonies of color and composition.
Critics have been enthusiastic about Fendrich’s work. In a review of the Scripps show in Art in America, Leah Ollman wrote, “She generates energy and rhythm in her work, through a carnivalesque approach to color, exuberant but finely tuned.” In a previous Art in America review, Eleanor Heartney said, “These small paintings (most are 30 by 27 inches) pack a graphic punch from a distance, while close-up they exhibit an engaging hand-painted quality.” In The New York Times, Grace Glueck observed that Fendrich’s odd juxtapositions “work, forming crisp compositions whose bright toylike colors, suave matings of geometric with biomorphic forms, and skilled painting give the work a decorous pizazz.”
Laurie Fendrich is Professor of Fine Arts at Hofstra University. She frequently contributes essays on cultural matters to The Chronicle Review in The Chronicle of Higher Education and blogs regularly for The Chronicle Review blog site, “Brainstorm.”
Laurie Fendrich: Recent Paintings will be on view at GARY SNYDER Project Space, 250 West 26th Street (between Seventh and Eighth Avenues), through April 2, 2011. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.
