NEW YORK
In a Violet Distance
curated by David Humphrey
October 29 - December 4, 2010

Matt Bollinger
Marc Desgrandchamps
Anne Chu
Martin McMurray
Norbert Schwontkowski
Alexi Worth

This exhibition is a reflection on looking; each work represents somebody looking at some thing or another person in ways that tangle that act with remembering, imagining and making. The protagonists in these paintings, drawings and sculpture are themselves spectators that put our role into a shifting light.

Violet is the color of bruises and royalty while it harmonizes in English with the words violent and violin. The word is redolent with poetic usage even as the hue is logically located on the color wheel between red and blue, or invisibly, as the short wavelength that burns our skin and bleaches our watercolors. We remain safe, though, at an inviolate distance to contemplate Bollinger, Chu, Desgrandchamps, Dufresne, Humphrey, McMurray, Schwontkowski and Worth’s crafted allegories of looking.

The people in Bollinger’s drawings often merge into the subject of their gaze just as Dufresne’s figure peers through goggles as she deliquesces into her airborne habitat. A mirror and a peephole become metaphors for looking in Schwontkowski’s work while Desgrandchamps uses a camera to inflect his grand essay on sight and consciousness. For Chu and McMurray the protagonist/looker obtains less distinction than the objects in their regard. Worth’s subjects both make contact with and obscure the person in their sight by means of their own shadow.

The paintings, sculpture and drawings in this exhibition remind us of the way experience has come to be described by neuroscientists as dreaming constrained by perception; that the world we think we know is, in terms of the brain, made up. Representations highlight the constituting power of description by tangling thought and vision with matter and material objects. To reflect on looking with the aid of artworks is to arrest the flow of perception and to step back from its immersive surround. All of the works In a Violet Distance are emphatically handmade and bring an accumulating sense of touch into contact with vision. They draw objects seen in the distance within intimate reach with their human-scaled sociability.
-David Humphrey

Matt Bollinger
b. 1981 / lives and works in Provincetown, MA

Selected Solo Shows
Miss You, ArtSTRAND, Provincetown, MA (2010) / The Hypnotism, Plane Space, NY (2008)

Selected Group Shows
Nice to Meet You, Sloan Fine Art, NY (2010) / Invitational, Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA (2009)
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David Humphrey
b. 1955 / Lives and works in NY

Selected Solo Shows
Lux Institute, CA ; Soloman Projects, Atlanta, GA ; Defrosted, a life of Walt Disney in collaboration with Adam Cvijanovic, Postmasters, NY (2010)

Selected Group Shows
Visible Vagina, David Nolan Gallery, NY ; Animal as Other, curated by April Gornik, Danese Gallery, NY (2010)

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Anne Chu
b. 1959 / Lives and works in NY

Selected Solo Shows
Kunstmuseum, Krefeld, Germany (2012) / 303 Gallery, NY (2008) / Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida (2005)

Selected Group Exhibitions
Ann Agee, Anne Chu, Mary Lucier, Betty Woodman, The Brooklyn Museum, NY (2001) / Anne Chu, Matthew Monahan, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2010)

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Martin McMurray
b. 1959 Detroit, MI / Lives and works in Berkeley, CA

Selected Solo Shows
Reenactments, Jeff Bailey Gallery, NY (Solo shows at Jeff Bailey, NY – 2008, 2005) ; Susanne Vielmetter Projects, LA (2010)

Selected Group Shows
Wall-to-Wall, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, LA (2010) / The Big Gift: Calgary Celebrates Art from Canadians, Glenbow Museum, Alberta, Canada (2009)

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Angela Dufresne
b. 1969 Hartford, CT / Lives and works in NY

Selected Solo Shows
Enlightenment Covers, Kinkead Contemporary, LA (2010) / Modern Times 1, Monya Rowe, NY ; Modern Times 2, CRG Gallery, NY (2009)

Selected Group Shows
Next Wave Artists, curated by Dan Cameron, BAM, NY (2009) /
Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT (travelling exhibition) (2008)

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Norbert Schwontkowski
b. 1949 Germany / Lives and works in Bremen Germany

Selected Solo Shows
Mitchell, Innes & Nash, NY (2009)

Selected Group Shows
Neue Bilder, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2009) / Der Symbolismus und die Kunst der Gegenwert, Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal (2007) / We Make any size of Mirror (Norbert Schwontkowski and Forrest Bess, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso), Mitchell, Innes & Nash, NY (2006)

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Marc Desgrandchamps
b. 1960 / Lives and works in Paris, France

Selected Solo Shows
Fragments d’un modernisme aleatoire, Galerie Zurcher, Paris (2010) / Solo Shows at Galerie Zurcher & Zurcher Studio – 2009, 2008, 2007, 2002, 2001, 2000) / Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006) / Kunstmuseum, Bonn (2005)

Selected Group Shows
Collection en mouvement, Curator Sylvie Ramon. Museum of Fine Arts, Shanghai ; Translucide, Marc Desgrandchamps & Ru Xiaofan. Curator Amy LI. Today Art Museum, Pekin (2010)

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Alexi Worth
b. 1964 / Lives and works in NY

Selected Shows
Eye to Eye, DC Moore Gallery, NY (2008) / International Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY (2007) / Couples, DC Moore Gallery, NY ; The 81st Annual, National Academy Museum, NY (2006) / Conceptual Realism, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2004)