Megan Mulrooney is happy to current Taut, our first solo exhibition of abstracted nonetheless life work with Los Angeles-based artist Annie Pendergrast. Flowers, vases, stripes, grids, and looping types recur throughout the exhibition, rendered in exact gradients and graphic coloration mixtures. The works really feel concurrently playful and managed: blooms swell to near-cartoon proportions, stems curl into coiling strains, and patterned backgrounds – gingham, stripes, checkerboards – flatten house whereas heightening visible rhythm.
Whereas flowers have lengthy functioned as symbols of magnificence and femininity, Pendergrast treats them as formal instruments, automobiles for testing coloration, composition, and construction. Nonetheless lives emerge right here not as quiet home scenes however as websites of compression, the place ornament and craft are celebrated, and the place modern design aesthetics floor to elicit each pleasure and uncanniness. All through, the work displays an curiosity in hybridity and humor: because the artist notes, a type apprehended just one means ceases to really feel alive.
Lots of Pendergrast’s compositions originate in fast, intuitive drawings, that are later translated into work by means of a sluggish, methodical strategy of layering and refinement. Her systematic method to paint, usually constructed round managed gradients and harmonies, is periodically disrupted. Static factors interrupt compositional move; edges misalign; coloration techniques break open. In a number of works, leftover paint from earlier canvases is reused, introducing probability into an in any other case exacting course of. These deviations intentionally interrupt graphic perfection, permitting the work to retain vulnerability beneath their end.
The exhibition engages a lineage of hard-edge and modernist abstraction, nodding to artists corresponding to Miyoko Ito, Albers, Léger, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, and Tomma Abts alongside references to miniature portray and illuminated manuscripts, the place precision, devotion, and labor coexist. Traditionally framed as an mental counter to the emotional extra of Summary Expressionism, hard-edge portray’s ascetic restraint is reexamined right here as one thing bodily and psychological. Pendergrast asks whether or not polish conceals id and feeling, or whether or not it may as an alternative make inside states extra exactly legible.
All through Taut, inanimate types are imbued with feeling. Like Kandinsky’s remark that Cézanne made dwelling issues out of teacups, Pendergrast’s work assign emotional presence to things, colours, and surfaces. This impulse, rooted in a childlike tendency to attribute feeling to the inanimate, extends to the physique itself, the place nudity, publicity, odor, and want are understood not as beliefs however as states of vulnerability. Pleasure, guilt, devotion, and longing flow into by means of the work, held taut inside constructions which might be as managed as they’re expressive.
