January 31 - February 25, 2017
Opening Reception: February 2, 5-8 pm
Blue Mountain Gallery announces a solo exhibition of work by Margaret Grimes from January 31 to February 25, 2017. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, February 2 from 5 – 8 PM.
The exhibition, entitled “The Secret Life of Trees,” includes seventeen works varying from large scale canvases and drawings to smaller, highly focused studies. All are done on the site and have motifs based on the woods surrounding Grimes’ studios in Connecticut and Maine. As in her previous works there is a dialogue between vigorous and sensuous paint handling and complexity of form. New to these paintings is an increasing interest in the effects of darkness.
“Dense, dark and seemingly impenetrable, Grimes’ landscapes are a mix of realism and abstract expressionism, the kind of unvarnished look one could imagine coming at the break of day through the eyes of an inchoate creature. -Kristen Nord ArtScope, 2013
“ [Grimes’] earliest works show an interest in Van Gogh, but really Grimes is more aligned with Soutine. Van Gogh is an outliner of forms, polemical in his positioning of right and wrong, whereas Soutine creates an allover field, not just of painterliness, but where danger and beauty meld into one another. Grimes’ work makes me think of Soutine’s Return from School After The Storm (1939), in the Phillips Collection, which was painted, literally, as Soutine was fleeing from the Nazis…Her paintings do have a powerful, surprising, and sometimes overwhelming scale, all the more impressive since she works from direct observation. But it is not just about the paintings’ size. Rather it is in their insistence and the explosiveness that comes out of recursive patterning – patterning that we know, intuitively, exists on both a universal and microscopic level.” -Jennifer Samet ArtCritical, 2013
Margaret Grimes received her M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania where she studied with Neil Welliver, Paul Georges and Rudy Burkhardt. Her work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries nationally, has been discussed in many publications, and included in several books on American landscape paintings. She founded the M.F.A. program at Western Connecticut State University which she directed from 2000 to 2012. She is a member of the National Academy of Design, where she received the Benjamin Altman prize in 2004.
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