2012 Catalogue Archive

The seductive and tender paintings of Maureen Gallace are some of the most complex, yet pared down oil paintings of American art today. For almost two decades she has been working with a defined set of themes – the windowless edifice, seascapes, winter bridges and lakefronts of her native New England. Though her pieces may appear to be conventional landscape paintings, they quickly transforms into a complex works influenced by American icons. Her devotion to a strict set of conditions draws comparisons to Agnes Martin and Donald Judd, artists who discovered poetry among the limited. Her depictions of geometric man-made forms is similar to Robert Smithson’s meditation on human disruption of the land, and like the home dwellers of the American Renaissance, Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickenson, she finds inspiration in the familiarity of her backyard. Critically maneuvering around these influences, one can see how the depiction of a house by the water in Surf Dive, August is more than just a landscape painting. Maureen Gallace’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions, including shows at the Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Douglas Hyde Museum, Dublin; Fukui City Museum of Art, Japan; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, where she was an artist in residence in 2005. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Wadsworth Atheneum; The Whitney Museum, New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others.