Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Nichole van Beek: The Longest Day, an exhibition of new paintings.
Van Beek’s new work dives deep into the expressive potential of geometry, pattern and surface. The starting point for these works is the artist’s time at the Vermont Studio Center, near her family's former home.
As much as the paintings might seem like exercises culled from a class on heavy-duty geometry, cross-pollinated by the Hubble telescope, they rub against a ground that speaks directly of a month spent in the sun and shade along the bank of the Gihon River. The landscape there left a strong impression upon her as a child, and even now she “can still smell the leaves and the earth.”
Around the time of the summer solstice last year, van Beek began the works by collecting local plants and other objects, setting up a makeshift darkroom and making sun prints, which became the foundation upon which to paint. Subsequent layers are shaped by letterforms as in her earlier paintings, in addition to variations on textbook geometry models.
These are images that announce their dimensionality, strive to be seen as excursions into space, but as attention glides from line to plane to shape to surface, totality collapses into satisfying incompleteness. They continuously fold flat, leaving an afterimage: transience, the fourth dimension, time.
This is van Beek’s third 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 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a 2011 Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship. She lives and works in Queens, New York.
Jeff Bailey Gallery is located at 127 Warren Street, Hudson, New York, 12534. Gallery hours are Thursday – Sunday, from 12-6 and by appointment. For further information or images, please contact the gallery at info@baileygallery.com or 518.828.6680.