NANCY GRAVES
After Image

Opening Reception: Friday, October 13, 2017 from 5:00 – 7:00 pm
On View through November 11, 2017


David Richard Gallery Presents After Image, the gallery’s first solo exhibition for New York-based artist Nancy Graves and the first exhibition of Grave’s paintings and prints with black grounds from 1982 through 1989.


David Richard Gallery, LLC
1570 Pacheco Street, Suite A1
Santa Fe, NM 87505
(505) 983-9555 www.DavidRichardGallery.com


David Richard Gallery is pleased to announce the presentation of Nancy Graves, After Image, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of artworks by the artist. After Image will be on exhibition from Friday, October 13 through November 11, 2017 at 1570 Pacheco Street, Suite A1, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505. There will be an opening reception on Friday, October 13 with Christina Hunter, Ph.D., Director of the Nancy Graves Foundation and Cassandra Lozano, Director of Artists’ Estates at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. A digital exhibition catalogue will be available on line with an Introduction by Christina Hunter.

Nancy Graves, a New York-based artist, worked in sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, theatre and film, and explored nearly every medium, method of production and form of presentation. Her art was rooted in natural history, evolution and science, inspired by data and technology as she enthusiastically imagined the future. Graves’ artwork is dynamic and complex, combining the past with the future, using layers of actual data and technical information, presenting a kaleidoscope of colors and array of representational and abstract imagery. Multiple and fragmented views from different vantage points, collaging representational imagery with topographical and astral maps, layering wind and wave patterns, all provide multiple points of entry into Grave’s artworks and imagination. Her use of data, maps and models from technology and scientific disciplines as diverse as paleontology, archaeology and astrophysics becomes the object and the art. The result is magnificent abstractions, dense with literal imagery, gesture, lyrical ribbons and swaths of color across the canvas. 

This presentation examines a specific series of paintings, prints and sculptures produced from 1982 through 1989. The paintings and prints are characterized by and unique in Graves’ oeuvre because of their black grounds. The paintings from 1981 to 1983 and the prints from 1987 relate to Graves’ costumes and set that she designed for Trisha Brown’s choreography and dance, Lateral Pass, in 1985. The stage was black and Graves’ props were colorful gestures made of acrylic and metal suspended from wires in several layers on the stage along with other suspended sculptural elements. The dancer’s costumes were perfectly coordinated as they danced in and around those suspended artworks. The paintings from 1989 also have a black ground with the addition of painted anodized aluminum sculptural elements that are attached to and protruding from the paintings. These paintings demonstrate how Graves moved effortlessly between sculpture and the two-dimensional picture plane, combining the two art forms by painting her sculptures and attaching armatures and three-dimensional elements to her paintings. The sculptural elements made the paintings more literal, pulling the strokes and imagery off the canvas and into three-dimensional space.  

The optical effects explored by Graves in the paintings and prints with the black ground came from her study of color under Josef Albers at Yale in the 1960s and his important course on the Interaction of Color. The vibrational combinations of neon-like colors against the black grounds are evocative of “after images” and hence, the title for the exhibition.  

About Nancy Graves:

Nancy Graves was born in 1939 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She studied at Vassar, graduating in 1961, then received her MFA in 1964 from Yale. Notable classmates included Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, Janet Fish and Brice Marden. Early in her career, she exhibited with the Graham Gallery in New York. In 1969, Graves had a solo exhibition of her iconic camel sculptures at the Whiney Museum of Art, at that time she was the youngest and the fifth woman to have a solo show at the Whiney. Graves then exhibited with André Emmerich Gallery and Knoedler & Co., in New York, and Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, then later with Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art and now Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York as well as David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe. Graves died very young at age 54 from cancer. 

Graves’ artworks are included in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, New Museum, New York, NY, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT among others. 


About David Richard Gallery:

Since its inception in 2010, David Richard Gallery has produced museum quality exhibitions that feature Post War abstraction in the US. The presentations have addressed specific decades and geographies as well as certain movements and tendencies. While the gallery has long been recognized as an important proponent of post-1960s abstraction—including both the influential pioneers as well as a younger generation of practitioners in this field— in keeping with this spirit of nurture and development the gallery also presents established and very new artists who embrace more gestural and representational approaches to the making of art as well as young emerging artists. 

In 2015 David Richard Gallery launched DR Projects to provide a platform for artists of all stripes—international, national, local, emerging and established—to present special solo projects or to participate in unique collaborations or thematic exhibitions. The goal is to offer a fresh look at contemporary art practice from a broad spectrum of artists and presentations. Opening the second location in New York in 2017 exposes the gallery’s artists to new markets, institutions and collectors. 

Associated Exhibitions

• Nancy Graves After Image
  October 11, 2017 - November 11, 2017
  MORE INFO

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