Blue Mountain Gallery announces a solo exhibition of work by Margaret Grimes from February 25 to March 22, 2014. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, February 27 from 5 - 8.
The exhibition, entitled "Passages," includes ten new works varying in size from miniature premiere coupe studies to ambitious large-scale diptychs, all of which focus on the trees surrounding Grimes' studios in Connecticut and Maine. Ranging from the stark and somber to the lush and sensuous, these trees appear as personages, which are immediately observed and yet metaphorical, with implications of time, change, mortality and rebirth.
"Margaret Grimes's paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest. And although Grimes depicts trees, her work also suggests technology. She paints the hard drive, the motherboard of nature. The interlocking, crisscrossing branches and root systems could as easily be wires and cables. The patterns the roots form are not exactly grids, but they nonetheless imply matrixes because they play with our desire to find patterns and regularity in the midst of chaos. In this sense they are about the sublime, the beauty that is at the edge of our grasp, in Rilke's sense, 'For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.' " -Jennifer Samet ArtCritical, 2013
"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
Margaret Grimes received her M.F.A. degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied with Neil Welliver and Paul Georges. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita from Western Connecticut State University where she founded and directed the M.F.A. program from 2000 - 2012, and is a member of the National Academy of Design. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries both regionally and nationally for the past thirty years. This is her seventeenth one-person show in New York.
Gallery hours 11-6, Tuesday - Saturday
Free, open to public
Image: Red October, oil on linen 60x88 inches, 2014
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