NEW YORK, NY.- Black Light, an exhibition of new paintings by Sarah Plimpton in which she continues to explore a dialogue between space and form, opened at the June Kelly Gallery on January 7. The exhibition will remain on view through February 9.

Plimpton says her interest in creating this body of work was her obsession with the space of night and how to organize within it small windows of landscape. The lines divide the night with patches of another world, our world and she says, “bring me back to early painting, the first lines on a pot or a wall...the lines that obliterate and illuminate the darkness of night.”

Plimpton’s new paintings transcend easy categorization. Her painstaking attention to form, to line, to color and arrangement suggests she pursues her own concerns with formalism. Plimpton’s interplay of Black Light (night space) and enigmatic floating abstract forms confound perspective, establish tensions between the familiar and the incalculable void and transform light into a kind of object itself.

While Plimpton’s carefully orchestrated paintings are singular and interlocking, shaped by and suspended within a dark void, they reflect a spontaneity that disregards tightly controlled picture-making. Plimpton’s compositions bring to mind the words of the late curator John Szarkowski in a photo essay that "… a work of art lives and has its meaning exclusively within the chalk-lines of its own playing field …."

Plimpton’s cosmic paintings explore spatial ambiguities in combination with multiple artful placement and counter-tensions of shapes within Black Light. Austere, involved, unassuming, perplexing and, perhaps eccentric, Plimpton’s random, muted color, land, water and skyscapes and the black space of night stir up the illusion of a De Chirico or a Léger dreamscape.

While Plimpton’s distinct and individual painting style excludes any overt reference to the autobiographical, her bold compositions are often tinged with a sense of lyrical humor, whimsy and surreal shifts that reveal an unimpeded creativity.

Plimpton, who is a poet as well as a painter, is a native of New York City. She received a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard Medical School before moving to Paris, where she lived for 19 years. She also studied at Pratt Graphics Center in New York.

Her work has been shown in exhibitions in New York, Paris and Zurich. She is represented in many important public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Heckscher Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library, The Harris Collection at Brown University, New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.