Juxtapoz Journal – Annie Pendergrast “Taut” @ Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles

Megan Mulrooney is comfortable to present Taut, our first solo exhibition of abstracted nonetheless life work with Los Angeles-based artist Annie Pendergrast. Flowers, vases, stripes, grids, and looping varieties recur all through the exhibition, rendered in precise gradients and graphic shade mixtures. The works actually really feel concurrently playful and managed: blooms swell to near-cartoon proportions, stems curl into coiling strains, and patterned backgrounds – gingham, stripes, checkerboards – flatten space whereas heightening seen rhythm.

Whereas flowers have prolonged functioned as symbols of magnificence and femininity, Pendergrast treats them as formal devices, autos for testing shade, composition, and building. Nonetheless lives emerge proper right here not as quiet residence scenes nevertheless as web sites of compression, the place decoration and craft are celebrated, and the place updated design aesthetics flooring to elicit every pleasure and uncanniness. All by, the work shows an curiosity in hybridity and humor: as a result of the artist notes, a kind apprehended only one methodology ceases to essentially really feel alive.

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Lots of Pendergrast’s compositions originate in quick, intuitive drawings, which can be later translated into work through a gradual, methodical strategy of layering and refinement. Her systematic technique to color, sometimes constructed spherical managed gradients and harmonies, is periodically disrupted. Static elements interrupt compositional flow into; edges misalign; shade methods break open. In quite a few works, leftover paint from earlier canvases is reused, introducing chance into an in every other case exacting course of. These deviations deliberately interrupt graphic perfection, allowing the work to retain vulnerability beneath their finish.

The exhibition engages a lineage of hard-edge and modernist abstraction, nodding to artists equal to Miyoko Ito, Albers, Léger, Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, and Tomma Abts alongside references to miniature painting and illuminated manuscripts, the place precision, devotion, and labor coexist. Historically framed as an psychological counter to the emotional further of Abstract Expressionism, hard-edge painting’s ascetic restraint is reexamined proper right here as one factor bodily and psychological. Pendergrast asks whether or not or not polish conceals identification and feeling, or whether or not or not it’d in all probability instead make inside states further precisely legible.

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All by Taut, inanimate varieties are imbued with feeling. Like Kandinsky’s assertion that Cézanne made residing points out of teacups, Pendergrast’s work assign emotional presence to issues, colors, and surfaces. This impulse, rooted in a childlike tendency to attribute feeling to the inanimate, extends to the physique itself, the place nudity, publicity, odor, and want are understood not as beliefs nevertheless as states of vulnerability. Pleasure, guilt, devotion, and longing circulate into through the work, held taut inside buildings that are as managed as they’re expressive.

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