Black & White in Nancy Hoffman Gallery Projects Space

September 5-October 4, 2003

This is to let you know that the first autumn Projects Space show at Nancy Hoffman Gallery will be “Black & White.”  The exhibition opens on September 5th and continues through October 4th.  It will include paintings, drawings and watercolors by Carolyn Brady, Michael Gregory, Remy Hysbergue, Lucy Mackenzie, Lynn McCarty, Susan Norrie, Frank Owen, Joseph Raffael and Bill Richards.

Eschewing color, these black and white works offer the viewer a world of nuance.  Some
of the artists in the exhibition, such as Bill Richards, work exclusively in black and white, graphite being his preferred medium. Richards’s newest drawing, Hershey Park III, focuses on a bloom bathed in full sunlight in a bed of field grasses and curling leaves.  In contrast to Richards’s restraint is Raffael’s pen and ink drawing of a hydrangea from the ‘70s, a tightly woven thicket of ink lines revealing the clustered flowers emerging from darkness.

Michael Gregory’s series of black and white tulips, oil on small panels, are stylized and stark while suggesting nature in its fullness in spring.  They invite a dialogue between painting and photography.  Lynn McCarty’s Round Peg/Square Hole, oil on aluminum, is an energized maze of round “blob”-shaped forms, creating a circle within one square of a diptych and a square within the other—playful and intense simultaneously.  Susan Norrie’s recent gouaches of children at play in a playground remind the viewer of a time and place that was (or seemed) safe in childhood.  A child’s worldview began within the bounds of the playground, the first recognized beloved space outside the home.  With these gouaches she addresses the question of where there is a safe haven for all in today’s world.

Frank Owen has created several new paintings for this exhibition.  Always concerned with authentic mark making in his paintings, his newest works investigate what the artist calls “the question of uniqueness and multiplicity.”  In the new works, he “draws” into a piece of polyethylene, creating a bas-relief-like surface on the canvas of skeining, swirling inter-weaving lines.  He then paints into the resultant negative surface of the canvas.  By creating a drawing he can use again, or alter somewhat, he can probe the possibilities of similarity and change in works of the same scale.

For additional information and/or photographs, please call 212-966-6676.