Vertical black lines of varying widths densely pack a white ground, creating a stark abstract composition that transitions from darker tones on the left to lighter striations on the right, evoking both graphic intensity and ephemeral movement.

in tandem

Anne Lindberg

4/29/2016 – 7/30/2016

Press Release (PDF)

Having recently moved across the county to the home of the Hudson River School painters, Anne Lindberg has recognized a deepening in her process, one which joins the personal and the abstract in reference to place and the sublime. In a small series of new drawings, Lindberg takes new turn, this time toward a more graphic language yet also a deeper commitment to abstraction and metaphor. In the small Gallery 4 upstairs, this dense grouping of large black on white looming forms asks essential questions about time, causality and mediation of form. Tandem forms pack themselves into the picture plane in ways similar to her watery ephemeral forms of past, but this time with greater contrast. Like the elegy paintings of Robert Motherwell, the Signature/Monograph series of photographs by Erin Shirreff, and the shaped paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, Lindberg believes that form, when distilled, has history and resonance. Reaffirming her interest in the elemental languages of drawing, here the physical and visual power of the work comes from it’s hand-drawn intensity, and embrace of nuanced craft and materiality. Clearly embedded into the pliant mat board, these drawings have a weight, a sensual weight, a metaphysical weight. Pairs of full rounded forms seem to create each other, as though one has been formed by the other, mirrored in an open book where language is silent.

“It is a mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed, it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” How can we combine old words with new order so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, the most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity, their need to change.”

excerpt from spoken words of Virginia Woolf,
part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, from a talk titled “Craftsmanship”

In 2016, Anne Lindberg’s work will be exhibited at the Akron Art Museum and the Omi International Art Center in addition to this solo exhibition at Haw Contemporary. In recent years, her work has been included in solo and group show at Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), University of Wyoming Art Museum, The Mattress Factory, US Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Lindberg’s work has been in solo and group exhibitions at such places as The Drawing Center (NYC), Tegnerforbundet (Norway), SESC Bom Retiro (Sao Paulo), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, among many others. Her work is held in collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Collection of Howard & Cindy Rachofsky, Niwako Kimono Company, Kansas City Chiefs, US Sprint Corporation, H&R Block, University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, Missouri Bank & Trust, American Century Investments, Hewlett Packard and the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and others.

She is the recipient of many awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She holds a BFA from Miami University, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Lindberg lives in Ancramdale, New York.

 

Exhibition Images ()

  • Two gallery walls display large-scale abstract drawings featuring paired, organic oval forms rendered in black linear marks on white paper. On the left, two vertical ovals sit side-by-side; on the right, two horizontal ovals are stacked vertically. The densely hatched surfaces create strong contrast and tactile depth against the minimal white ground.
  • Two large oval forms, one dark charcoal and one light gray, face each other on a white two-panel surface. Both ovals feature subtle linear surface textures and are rendered in hand-drawn graphite, creating a sense of weight and dimensionality against the gallery wall.
  • Two framed works on a white gallery wall featuring pairs of dark, hand-drawn oval forms rendered in black on white paper with textured, linear surfaces. The left drawing displays a single vertical pair; the right work shows two pairs arranged side by side. Both pieces emphasize high contrast and the visible intensity of hand-drawn mark-making embedded into mat board.
Vertical black lines of varying widths densely pack a white ground, creating a stark abstract composition that transitions from darker tones on the left to lighter striations on the right, evoking both graphic intensity and ephemeral movement.

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