Maureen Gallace

 

What fundamental quality do all art objects share? The answer, according to British art critic Clive Bell, is “significant form,” which he loosely defined as the distillation of line, color, and shape into moving combinations. His examples: Chartres stained glass, Persian bowls, Cezanne paintings, and Giotto frescoes. To this list we can add Maureen Gallace’s paintings and drawings. Her depictions of New England saltbox houses, beaches, shells, and sea grass distill not just ordered abstract form but an Atlantic Ocean’s worth of emotion.

Generating power from reticence, Gallace’s modestly scaled, repeating views fuse the genres of landscape painting and still life. While her paintings are rendered as flattened, dreamlike interior landscapes, her drawings anatomize their hard-won spontaneity. Made less rather than more familiar with each rendition, her significant forms take on the shape of a sturdy metaphor; one that expands its reach as it invites meditation. During this pandemic, the memorializing power of her art has grown as big as the outdoors.

— CVF, USFCAM

 

Maureen Gallace, Early September, 2019. Acrylic on paper. 12-1/8 x 12-1/8 in. (30.8 x 30.8 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, Beach Path, 2019. Acrylic on paper. 10 x 10 in. (25.4 x 25.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, Summer Rainbow, 2019. acrylic on paper. 12 x 15 in. (30.5 x 38.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, January (Southport), 2020. Acrylic on paper. 11 x 12 in. (27.9 x 30.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, Hill Farm Road, November, 2020. Compressed charcoal on paper. 10 x 13 in. (25.4 x 33 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

 

Maureen Gallace, Wave, Black Rocks, 2019. Compressed charcoal, graphite and conte crayon on paper. 10-1/16 x 13-1/32 in. (25.6 x 33.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, Shell, 2018-2019. Compressed charcoal on paper. 10-1/16 x 13-1/16 in. (25.6 x 33.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

Maureen Gallace, Ice Storm, Easton (with Robert), 2019. Graphite on paper. 11-1/16 x 12-1/16 in. (28.1 x 30.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

 

About Maureen Gallace

(Stamford, Connecticut, 1960)

She lives and works in New York City.

Maureen Gallace is an artist who works within the self-imposed confines of a rigorously limited scale and subject matter. She is a painter of small, unpeopled landscapes in which a modest number of elements—a house, a barn, a boat, bushes, grass, sky—recur with a quietly mesmerizing insistence. In focusing on a favored motif, Gallace succeeds in isolating something universally familiar yet utterly mysterious. In 2019, Gallace presented an exhibition of nearly 70 works on paper at Gladstone Gallery’s uptown space, the first time she exhibited this component of her practice publicly. Gladstone Gallery will present an online exhibition of new works by Maureen Gallace in December, 2020 which will expand upon her 2019 show. Solo exhibitions include Gladstone Gallery (NYC); MoMA PS1 (NYC); and Maureen Paley Gallery (London). Group exhibitions include For a Dreamer of Houses, Dallas Museum of Art; America Will Be!: Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art; December, Misako & Rosen (Tokyo, Japan); September 11, MOMA PS1 (NYC); Whitney Biennial (2010), Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC); and Attics of My Life, Jack Hanley Gallery (NYC).

Artist Instagram: @maureengallace

Gallery website: gladstonegallery.com

Gallery Instagram: @gladstone.gallery