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Jane Fine
PIEROGI Leipzig
28 April - 23 June, 2007
Opening Saturday, 28 April. 11am-9pm
Click on thumbnails
below to view larger images
Skirmish
For her first one-person exhibition in Germany, New York artist Jane Fine
will be showing new paintings on wood panels made with poured acrylic
paint and marker. The show's title refers literally to armed conflict,
as well as metaphorically to the painterly struggles that take place on
the work's surface.
In Fine's work, the painted field is a battlefield, located on the border
between figuration and abstraction. It is a place where hard-edged painting
has delivered a sucker punch to biomorphic abstraction; figure and ground
are dueling; there is a food fight between drawing and painting; and every
form is in danger of melting away in the brightly-hued goo of dripping
acrylic.
As we mark the fourth anniversary of the apparently endless war in Iraq,
a dose of absurdity has penetrated Fine's work. There is no finality to
her depicted conflicts as each over-armed combatant, confused by smoke
and slop, misses its target. In the newest paintings, "My Space"
and "Checkpoint," Fine's attitude about war has necessitated
a "time out" from the battlefield. The struggle between figure
and ground has subsumed the battle between tanks and airships, leaving
only vestiges of small guns and barbed wire floating in pictorial space.
For now, Fine has granted abstraction a temporary victory.
Jane Fine received a BA from Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) and she
attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME).
She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship. She has attended residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY),
Cité Internationale des Artes (Paris, France), and Millay Colony
for the Arts (Austerlitz, New York).
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