2014 Catalogue Archive

Unabashedly situated within the historical discourse of abstraction, LA-based Monique van Genderen’s paintings, nonetheless, possess a uniquely contemporary sense of scale, color, and pattern. In this untitled work from 2011, van Genderen uses a pared down color palette to render an off-kilter, yet elegantly balanced, composition. Her paintings often give the sense that they’ve been cropped or enlarged, or both, giving the viewer the vague feeling that if they look long enough, a fragment of the work will bring the whole piece into focus. This strange and fertile territory of ‘abstraction on the border of representation’ is the place where much of van Genderen’s work resides. Van Genderen has had solo exhibitions at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Heilbronn; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and Chinati Foundation, Marfa. Her work is in the collections of IVAM, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern; LACMA, Los Angeles; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, among others.