NEW YORK, NY.- Morgan Lehman Gallery announces Sharon Louden’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Community. The exhibition runs October 24-December 7, 2013.
Sharon Louden’s visual vocabulary is one of gesture and motion explored through many different media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, animation and installation. The foundation of her work is rooted in painting and drawing where characters transform into what are intended to be minimal, anthropomorphic beings. Although abstract and formal, these entities have human-like aspects within their minimal state; they are full of whimsy and playfulness, elegance and beauty. In this latest body of work, Community, Louden’s vocabulary of abstract gestures transform into the figurative, such as furniture, then back again, challenging what we consider the traditional roles of abstraction and figuration; design and environment.
Through the specific, awkward placement of these forms, Louden intends to evoke movement in space. The same simple lines and gestures in her drawings and paintings also inform her sculpture of the same series, where found furniture is reduced to its formal elements and shifts seamlessly in and out of abstraction. This interest in movement and figuration references past series in Louden's oeuvre, such as Agents, where Louden combined rubber gestural forms with miniature chairs, forging a new unified object. In her recent Merge installation at the University of Connecticut, a permanent site-specific public art commission, Louden manipulated flat colored aluminum strips that appear to grow and move as one entity, crawling and "living" throughout the space. In a culmination of her practice spanning over 20 years, Community incorporates elements of design, line, implications of the domestic, formality in abstraction, and references to figuration all rolled into one.
Louden’s latest animation, also titled Community, is being featured during her solo exhibition. After numerous screenings in museums, this is the first time that any of her 11 animations have been shown in a gallery setting in New York City. Community premiered at the National Gallery of Art in the East Wing Auditorium on September 8th in a one-evening screening event entitled, “Cine’ Concert: Abstract Animation Since 1970” and will travel to different venues in the future.
In celebration of Louden’s new book, “Living and Sustaining a Creative Life,” Morgan Lehman Gallery will host a book event on November 6th from 6-8pm. Edited by Sharon Louden, this collection of essays by 40 working artists from across the country and abroad is published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Sharon Louden and many of the contributors will be present for readings and a book signing.
Sharon M. Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University, School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
