Nancy Toomey Fine Art is featuring works by Mark Perlman, Brian Rutenberg, and Audrey Tulimiero Welch around the theme of gestural abstraction this week, from the Beauty in Lockdown catalogue. Gestural abstraction is a term used to describe a process rather than a movement–the point is not so much what is painted, but how. Gestural painters generally apply material to a surface intuitively and physically, based on individual primal realities and deep personal expression. The painting is a recording of the gestures made, and a relic of the action. Perlman, Rutenberg, and Welch reference nature to varying degrees, yet the visceral physicality of the painting is its ultimate reality and form. Perlman’s gestural expressionism is compressed into the contemplative language of harmonic structures that are more contained and directed. Their inherent lyricism investigates the contradictions of flatness with atmosphere, and solitude with energy. With Rutenberg the allusion is usually to landscape but, looking more closely, it’s clear that his primary interest is how the painting was made. The forceful manipulation of his material calls more attention to the forms within the confines of the canvas than any sense of actual place. Welch’s abstract language often refers to the diagrammatic quality of maps, and repeats pictorially their use of sign, line, and symbol. Her calligraphic marks overlay sharp linear structures embedded in the painterly grounds of the canvas or paper. In all of these painter’s works, the viewer is invited to make their own discoveries hidden in the deep views of color and line that energize the surface of each painting.

 

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MARK PERLMAN, Fade, 2019
Encaustic on Panel, 60 x 48 Inches Framed
$9,000

Bay Area based Mark Perlman works in the medium of encaustic: pigment mixed with hot wax, the oldest form of painting in civilization dating back to Egyptian Old Kingdom tombs. The paintings are built up layer over layer to create what the artist calls the underbelly, a luminous field of mid-tone color upon which he composes and builds his imagery. Perlman’s deep fascination with processes of change effected by time and nature’s gradual breaking down of form has developed into a profound meditation on loss and dissolution, restoration and retrieval, and the interaction between mutability and permanence… More »

 

BRIAN RUTENBERG, Looming Pine 6, 2018
Oil on Paper, 30 x 22.5 Inches Framed
$8,000

New York based Brian Rutenberg’s painting presents the landscape in the same way he learned to see it, by lying on his belly with his chin in the dirt, foreground so close he can taste it and background far away. No middle ground. Seeing from a bug’s-eye view instantly compresses space, like closing an accordion, and makes the viewer complicit in reconstructing the landscape; Rutenberg provides the close-up and the far away, and the viewer supplies the middle… More »

 

AUDREY TULIMIERO WELCH, Holus Bolus (All at Once), 2018
Acrylic On Canvas, 42 x 48 Inches
$7,500

Audrey Tulimiero Welch’s abstracted layered paintings can be read as a metaphoric map that contains, in its embedded layers, personal stories and lived relationships of daily life. Holus Bolus has a unique genesis. In the fall of 2017, during an open studios event, Welch invited the public to collaborate with her on this painting. She selected three specific maps and had them available to transfer on the surface with a gel medium transfer technique. On the side of the painting, in pencil are written the names of her collaborators. The choice of maps coincided with two significant events, one personal and one global: she and her family had recently returned to the United States after living fifteen years abroad, and the Nigerian refugee crisis was in full swing. The maps selected included a topographical of her new hometown Tacoma, and the broad lines intersecting the picture plane in this painting was sourced from a map that traced the walking routes of Nigerian refugees traveling on foot from Niger to the Cameroon border… More »

 

The Beauty in Lockdown catalogue works are available with special price considerations. For more information please contact:
 
Nancy Toomey
(415) 307-9038

 

 

Watch the catalogue video here: