Reception: Saturday evening, November 5, 6:30 – 8:00, public invited

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 10:00 – 5:30 and by appointment

P o l y p e t a l o u s
New Powdered Pigment Drawings by Mary Judge

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of Mary Judge’s new powdered pigment drawings. Judge is an established artist who maintains studios in Brooklyn, NY and St. Louis, MO. Her paintings, drawings and prints are in collections throughout the world. She is an artist who demonstrates mastery across many mediums, each new series illustrates her continuing exploration of materiality and form. Her ongoing exploration of powdered pigments is used to stunning effect in her most recent Pop Flower series.

Judge’s work is about transformation through repetition. By employing an underlying geometric structure, the work explores the emotive power of reductive forms deployed through that repetition. The work explores the diagrammatic, the topological and three-dimensional aspects of the drawing both through a linear-planar and tonal-atmospheric representation of form to explore a kind of lost territory between image and object.

For this series, pigment drawings on paper were made with a perforated stencil laid on rag paper and pounced with a sack of powdered pigment. Pigment passes through the stencil leaving marks, patterns or dots that create an overall image. Mary Judge, who also lives in Italy, has been developing this distinctive technique which is based on spolvero (dust in Italian) and was used by Renaissance artists to transfer drawings to the wall for fresco painting. Each stencil is made by tracing a single symmetrical form numerous times. By working in series, Judge is able develop a form and continue to mine its rich variations until its exhausted.

Judge’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, NYU/Langone Hospital, New York, NY, Cassino Museo di Arte Contemporanea, Cassino, Italy, American Embassy, Sanaa, Yemen, US Embassy, Kazakhstan, Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, The British Museum, London, England, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, to name a few.

Please contact the gallery for images, information or to arrange a preview of our exhibitions.
Kenise Barnes, director: [email protected],
Lani Holloway, gallery manager [email protected]
B. Avery Syrig, sales support, [email protected]