Featured Off-Site Exhibition: Léonie Guyer in ABSTRACT

A B S T R A C T
Léonie Guyer, Ruth Laskey, Lynne Woods Turner
September 4 – December 5, 2010
Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR
View Léonie Guyer’s works in the exhibition

Léonie Guyer
Untitled, no. 63, 2009 (Detail)
oil and true gesso on wood panel
13 x 9 x 1 1/8 in.

“My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.” —Agnes Martin

Abstract and non-objective artistic methodologies are most often associated with Modernism and the European and Russian avant-garde; but visual and material abstraction has flourished for millennia, globally, as an essential human activity, as symbolism, ornament, and plan. ABSTRACT brings together the work of three contemporary women artists inspired by the breadth of abstraction’s spiritual, esoteric, and ritualistic dimensions.

For Guyer, Laskey, and Turner, abstraction, and specifically, geometric abstraction, is a means for examining and manifesting experience and sensation as directly as possible, rigorously visualizing, in Agnes Martin’s words, “… what is forever known in the mind.” Continuing the rich legacy of women abstract artists such as Hilma af Klint, Anni Albers, Agnes Martin, and Nasreen Mohamedi, the artists in ABSTRACT engage abstraction’s radical self-reflexivity as a natural expression of understanding, making, and being in the world, offering the viewer the same experience in return.

An exhibition catalog will be published by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery with essays by curator Stephanie Snyder, and Lawrence Rinder, Director, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, with a poem by Franck André Jamme. Publication date: October, 2010.

Leonie Guyer’s work in the exhibition is available through Triple Base Gallery. Email info@basebasebase.com for more info.