Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by the US American painter Maureen Gallace (born 1960 in Stamford, Connecticut, USA) in their Munich gallery.
Maureen Gallace’s small paintings seem to resist interpretation, drawing the observer in completely. At first sight, these paintings could be considered naive, but when looked at more closely they turn out to be stubborn and difficult to categorize.
Gallace, who has been exhibiting her work since 1990, has pursued her own conceptual approach - often painting landscapes that are empty of people, but where isolated buildings indicate the presence of the human. Gallace uses her own private photographs as a source for the subjects of her paintings. By repeating what appears to be the same subject again and again, she develops a genealogy of the house, the hut, and of the landscape that provides the space for these dwellings. The perspective is as if deconstructed, and the picture appears as a concentrate of the memory of a place once seen.
Gallace’s work is in the tradition of American landscape painting, and especially in the modern intellectual tradition of Cezanne, Hopper, and Ryman, and also of Judd and Cornell.
Her works possess a remarkable, even peculiar, originality, they convey the belief in the power of beauty, which can never be fully achieved.
2006 Maureen Gallace had one person exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. In 2005 Gallace exhibited at the Chinati Foundation ins Marfa,TX, and the year before had a one person show at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. A catalogue with text by Rick Moody was published to accompany this exhibition. Previous one-person shows include the Dallas Museum of Art, TX in 2003, the Fukui City Art Museum, Japan in 2001 and the Museum Schloss-Hardenberg in Velbert, Germany in 1996. Gallace’s paintings are included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, TX, Wadsworth Atheneum, the Fondazione Di Vignola, Italy and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers
Schellingstrasse 48
D-80799 München
Phone +49 (89) 330 40 600