ADELE ALSOP
New Paintings and an Installation
March 24 through April 30, 2005
The gallery is pleased to announce Adele Alsop: New Paintings and An Installation. The show will include twelve paintings and a painted installation adapted from a stage set for the play Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco. This will be Alsop’s second exhibition with the gallery.
Utah has been Adele Alsop’s adopted muse for almost twenty years. The redrock landscape and its unexpected flowerings are the primary subject of her paintings. Alsop paints with abandon. Her fluid strokes conjure a febrile dream of the desert and explore the dichotomy of how one lives in and tames a wild landscape. Terry Tempest Williams has written, “The paintings of Adele Alsop are pure passionate energy . . . she understands the creative tension that exists between the domestic and the wild. Each image is a loving story of a world in creation.”
In the Wild Flowers and Full Moon a spell is in effect. A jar of freshly picked flowers wrought from the inhospitable soil sits on a white tabletop. The human offering is thrown into relief in relation to the mountainous desert, while an afternoon full moon presides (top and center) over the scene. In this painting the magical elements of Alsop’s work are foregrounded. It is a pantheistic world that is described. One that is coming into existence – witnessed by the looseness and vehemence of the brushstrokes. In the intersection between still life and landscape Alsop often finds a transcendental place.
In 2003, on his last occasion reviewing Alsop’s work, Garrit Henry wrote: “Bierstadt and Blakelock are Alsop’s 19th century predecessors, while the Action painters—especially de Kooning—and Neil Welliver, with whom she studied at Yale, are her immediate forebears. Alsop proves her painterly peerage as she goes. This is neo-romanticism of the most ambitious sort. Magic, indeed, is the subject of a number of the paintings.”
Alsop was born and raised in Western Massachusetts. She received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she remained for some years to teach before living in New York, and then Castle Valley, Utah.
A selection of Alsop’s paintings from the past three years will be on view concurrently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist’s Gallery at Fort Mason Center, opening March 23. (www.sfmoma.org).
Upcoming: Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan: Cranberry Island—May 7 through June 17, 2005.
To preview the exhibition, access images and texts please visit:
www.alexandregallery.com.
For further information and images contact Ellen Robinson at:
[email protected].
