Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Nichole van Beek, Dare Read Dear, an exhibition of new paintings.
Van Beek continues to make compositions derived from letterforms, but with a new focus on words that have a doubling or tripling in spelling, sound and/or meaning. Examples are “dare read dear,” “hubbub,”, “all fall,” “wee,” and “plum lump.”
The letters and words mostly serve as a vehicle for arranging space and are usually altered beyond recognition. A word’s meaning may have guided her in color choice or paint application, but usually her mark making is intuitive.
Patterning is equally important as a compositional device, whether it is from dyeing the canvas (the beginning of her process), painting directly on printed fabric, or adding even more patterning and texture. The hard edge of a letter abuts a washy color field; icing-like runnels of paint snake through geometric grids. A funky sort of architecture develops, entwined with organic forms. Figure and ground shift and flip.
Hard and soft, sharp and fuzzy, van Beek’s paintings are jauntily her own.
This is van Beek’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY in 1998 and her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007. She received a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a 2011 Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at Geoffrey Young Gallery, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Brian Morris Gallery, Susan Inglett Gallery and in The Last Brucennial, 2014. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Jeff Bailey Gallery is located at 127 Warren Street, Hudson, New York, 12534. Gallery hours are Friday – Sunday, from 12-6 and by appointment. For further information or images, please contact the gallery at info@baileygallery.com or 518.828.6680.