Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of contemporary painting in our Larchmont, NY gallery.

Elizabeth Gourlay’s paintings are a meditation on form, line and color, they are a gradual yet progressive rumination leading to a vocabulary that has become increasingly complex throughout the artist’s career. The shapes Gourlay uses are found in the things she sees in everyday life or in her studio; the shapes are used as is or they are transformed into their essential geometric form. The artist manipulates form, making minute changes in color, area, edge or orientation with the awareness that these subtle changes can enhance or destroy the viewer’s emotive response. Line continues to be at the core of Gourlay’s work. In making the paintings, Gourlay shifts back and forth between emphasizing the geometry and color. The artist describes her color choices in this way: “One color may be seen or appear in my mind and grow to an association of two or up to six. I rarely use a large palette within one piece. I minimize the color palette instinctively to reduce variables, produce harmony and eliminate discordance. I may explore a broad range of colors and then reduce it to those I am most invested in.” The color choices in a painting’s ground are equally important to those of the field; many subtle arrangements, active lines or subtle layers of colors are investigated in the ground.

Gourlay earned her MFA at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, and her BA from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work has been shown extensively throughout the United States and she is the recipient of numerous residencies, fellowships and awards including Artist in Residence at the studio of Sol LeWitt in Spoleto, Italy. Gourlay’s work has been written about in The New Criterion, Painters’ Table, and Gorky’s Granddaughter, to name a few.

Stephen Maine is widely recognized for his innovative material explorations. He is best known for large-scale abstract paintings made using a series of printing plates.

“Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes would save a lot of time and trouble. This indirect, intentionally imprecise production method yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception” – Maine, 2019

Maine’s work can be found in many collections including Museum of Modern Art Library Special Collection, New York, NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, The New York Public Library, New York, NY, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Art in Embassies Collection, US Department of State, Washington, DC, Yale University Art Galleries, New Haven, CT. His work has been reviewed by Artcritical.com, Two Coats of Paint, Hyperallergic and The New Criterion to name a few. Stephen Maine earned a BFA (Painting), Indiana University, Bloomington, IN and an MFA (Visual Art), Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier VT. The artist has recently relocated from Brooklyn, NY to Cornwall, CT.

Margaret Lanzetta This exhibition features a series of new large-scale oil and acrylic paintings executed in her signature style that includes the use of handmade screens and stencils. The paintings are complimented by three lyrical black and white paintings on hand-made paper. Lanzetta draws inspiration from Buddhism, nature, Islamic architecture and sixties pop culture. In these new paintings, the artist continues her exploration in repetition and juxtaposition of pattern and symbolism drawn from diverse cultural sources. The color-saturated canvases feel simultaneously deeply familiar and very contemporary.

Represented by the gallery since 2005, Lanzetta has been awarded three Fulbright Fellowships, a permanent public commission for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts and Design for the New York subway, The British Academy in Rome Abbey Painting Award, a Ucross Residency and several MacDowell Fellowships. The artist’s work has been exhibited in widely in the U.S. as well as internationally in Japan, Sweden, Italy, India, Morocco and Thailand Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The British Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Harvard Art Museum, Yale university Art Gallery, New York University/Langone Medical Center, and several other corporate and private collections. Lanzetta lives and works in New York City.

Janna Watson is a young artist who has quickly made an impression on the contemporary art scene. Her abstract compositions and energetic brushstrokes possess an elegant and powerful vitality. A masterful colorist, Watson juxtaposes analogous colors against “difficult” and disharmonious hues resulting in a taut and carefully balanced abstract works. She creates energetic, often precarious tension with her deliberate and confident marks and the spontaneous drips and gestures that are artifacts of her intuitive process. Watson paints on birch panel, often letting the wood grain become another active element in her composition.

Watson’s paintings can be found in several significant collections, including in the Toronto collections of TD Bank Financial Group, CIBC, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. In 2017, she was selected to create a mural-size painting for the feature space in AURA, North America’s largest condominium building. Watson earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, ON. The artist lives and works in Toronto, Canada.