Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce an online presentation of new paintings by Monique van Genderen on both Gallery Platform Los Angeles and on the Vielmetter Los Angeles webpage. Titled “Each of These Paintings Can Be Named After a Famous Painter,” the group of works represent the artists foray into a new mode of painting focused on the mechanisms of drawing at an intimate scale. These material departures create a collection of bijou compositions that display van Genderen’s adeptness with abstraction. A selection of exquisite compositions will be featured on each platform to create a conversation between both groups of works.

From the artist:

“I’ve dedicated my practice to exploring the bounds of painting. I am constantly working with the effects of scale especially in the last years, working on two side by side 11.5’ x 35’ canvases in my studio in La Jolla, and a parallel series of twenty-three 10” x 8” canvases.”

“I have expanded my work in material experimentation with oil sticks, a tool that appears to have a closer relationship to drawing than the methods I normally employ. In challenging myself to engage with the demands of a smaller painting, along with new material, I continue my engagement with thinness and its possibilities for optical illusion and transformative depths. Using oil sticks, the first mark is within drawings’ nature which is then transformed by painting techniques to create the quality of mimicking an under layer. This conveys the complications that a screen or a veil often produce in many of my paintings. It has the sensibility of the ‘undone’ that is important to the general idea of thinness and transparency in my work. The raw qualities of the mark-making expand the definition of the surface, contradicting the notion that thin is something light and delicate, resulting in a material and conceptual experiment of an explosive nature.”

“These paintings represent an exploration of Modern painting legacies: from Monet’s Haystack paintings; to histories of abstraction’s relationship to the real; to the figure that dissolves in an Elaine De Kooning; and to the atmospheric landscapes of a painting by James McNeil Whistler. The generations of tape painters and material innovators have in turn left their indelible mark on me, as they took a flat surface to create worlds and time beneath and above the picture plane.”

Monique van Genderen is based in Los Angeles and La Jolla. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1991. Van Genderen has had solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Miles McEnery, New York, NY; D’Amelio Gallery, New York, NY; and Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions with the Kunstverien Rosa Luxembourg Platz, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Los Angeles, CA; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the 48th Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C.

For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at [email protected]