D’Amelio Terras, New York
June 30 – August 19, 2011
Curated by Kate McNamara
Including work by artists Polly Apfelbaum, Nicole Cherubini, Joanne Greenbaum, Suzanne McClelland, Jenny Monick, Carrie Moyer, Dona Nelson and Laurel Sparks
D’Amelio Terras invites curator Kate McNamara to present Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, a group exhibition of artists working in abstraction.
While the paintings of the exhibition are seemingly disparate in structure, each exemplify common attributes made visible through the artist’s engagement with process and practice; each painting foregrounds technique and pushes the medium through an active investigation and dissection of abstraction. Many of the paintings were conceived through action-oriented methods, made visible through paint stains, the presence of handiwork, or the orientation of brushwork. These paintings collaboratively solicit and invite an investigation of painting, abstraction, process, and practice. The proposed exhibition provides a charged space where these relevant discourses can be considered, without being imposed, and petitions the viewer to deliberate on her or his own assumptions about painting as a material, a vocabulary, a genre, a pluralistic history, and critical tool. The word “affinities” is used in the context of this exhibition to express and secure the multiplicity of relationships imposed, maintained, insinuated, and assumed throughout the show. “Affinities” suggests certain associations and similarities in defining the paintings and the artists of the exhibition, as well as captures a working definition for the word abstraction. “Affinities” also relates to paint as a substance that is relied upon for its use in combination with other material; it has the capability of facilitating relationships between color, texture, structure, and design. “Affinities” also points to interpersonal dialogues and independent relationships the artists have with one another.
Kate McNamara is Director and Chief Curator at the Boston University Art Gallery. She is also a co-founder of Cleopatra’s, a Brooklyn-based project space. She received her M.A. at The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. with a Curatorial Concentration from Hampshire College, MA. Kate has held curatorial positions at MoMA PS1, New York; AIR Antwerpen, Belgium; and Participant, INC., New York.
