Project Description
SOLO EXHIBITION
Tree Map Body – June 21 to August 12, 2017
GROUP SHOW
Summer – July 13 to August 18, 2018
Audrey Tulimiero Welch
“My abstract acrylic paintings can be read as metamorphic ‘maps’ that contain in their vibrant layers embedded stories and the lived relationship of daily life.
Over the past fifteen years, I have lived and worked in Indonesia, Thailand, and Australia. This led me to explore ideas of mapping and place as subjects for painting. I respond to the diagrammatic linear quality of maps and relate pictorially to how cartography locates place through the use of sign, line and symbol. Using the formal language of line, gesture, color, speed and atmosphere, I want to lead the viewer to painted ‘sites’ that are familiar and obscure, personal and universal.
My process is highly physical. It is produced with an experienced swift speed of hand, arm and body. I want the viewer to be abducted into the visceral physicality of my paintings. The use of the body as a painting tool is not new and nods to how the tenets of abstract expressionism inform my practice.”
-Audrey Tulimiero Welch, May 2017
Audrey Tulimiero Welch is an internationally exhibited painter who grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and currently resides in Tacoma, Washington. She earned her BFA in 1980 from the University of Delaware and her MFA (Scholarship Award) in 2010 from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. For the past fifteen years Welch has lived and work in Indonesia, Thailand, and Australia, which led the artist to focus on the subjects of line, mapping and place. Welch’s abstract acrylic paintings can be read as metamorphic ‘maps’ that contain in their vibrant layers embedded stories and the lived relationships of daily life.
Welch’s paintings are included in numerous international public and private collections including Google, Western Australia’s Ronald McDonald House in Perth, Hyatt Regency in Oman, Four Seasons Hotel, MGM, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Welch’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Bangkok, Indonesia, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Museum exhibitions include Frauen Museum in Bonn, Germany, Coos Bay Art Museum in Oregon, Bade Museum in Berkeley, California, and Museo Italo Americano, San Francisco. She was nominated for the Daedalus Foundation Fellowship in painting. Publications include Fine Art Magazine, Thailand Art and Design Guide, Architectural Digest, New American Paintings, and San Francisco Chronicle.
Tree Map Body is Welch’s fourth solo exhibition with Nancy Toomey Fine Art.
“The paintings of American-born Audrey Welch, who has lived on the far side of the Pacific for many years, exemplify a kind of contemporary international-style abstraction . . .The sophistication of Welch’s work appears to derive equally from studio practice, life experience and observation of other contemporaries’ works.”
-Kenneth Baker, Art Critic, San Francisco Chronicle
“But while [Welch’s] paintings refer to much – from aerial views to graffito – they defy the strictly referential. As ‘maps’ they do not provide information but instead function as painterly equivalents that suggest the movement through and memory of spaces; Welch conflates the spaces of her references with the space of the painted surface and the works emerge as both cerebral and physical”.
-Brian Curtin, Art Writer, Exhibition Catalogue, Audrey Tulimiero Welch, South is at the Top
“Welch’s abstract language combines expressive and calligraphic strokes with sharp linear structures, both embedded in and overlaying painterly grounds.”
-Brian Curtin, Art Writer
