Nancy Toomey Fine Art is featuring works by Brian Dettmer, Monica Lundy, and Lyndi Sales around the theme of intuitive reduction this week, from the Beauty in Lockdown catalogue. These artists share the investigation of subtraction and elimination in their work, exploring underlying concepts through precise craftsmanship and intellectual rigor. Brian Dettmer performs a literal autopsy on the physical book, creating new facts and fictions by his sculptural manipulations. Monica Lundy’s layers of media on handmade paper is subsequently removed, erased or burned away, revealing portraits of the dispossessed. Lyndi Sales’s filagree cut work is inspired by shattered glass experiments. Painting with clear water, and then carefully dropping India ink into the painted area, Sales experiences a process of surrender with the outcome often uncontrollable.

 

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BRIAN DETTMER, Encyclopedia of All Nations, 2019
Hardcover Book, Acrylic Varnish, 11.25 x 8.75 x 2.875 Inches
$9,000

In this series by New York based Brian Dettmer, single reference books become unbound from their spine and lay flat on the wall as a rectangular machine full of compressed data. The book’s framing begins to fall apart as fragments of text, diagrams, and illustrations melt together into a single organism. The book becomes a game board, a mechanical component, or a geometric landscape of bits and bites of data. Layers of pages and chunks of information have been removed, as if deleted or erased from a hard drive. We are left with both a shell and a vessel, a geometric landscape, a device or a tool that can work to hold ideas and help solve new problems… More »

 

MONICA LUNDY, Aurora, 2017
Coffee, Burned Paper and Charcoal on Khadi Paper, 55 x 38 Inches Unframed
$11,500

Aurora comes from the Monica Lundy exhibition Deviance – Women in the Asylum During the Fascist Regime, a rumination on the incarceration of Italian women and girls during the era of Mussolini, which was born of a year spent abroad in Rome, Italy. In this series of paintings, Lundy focuses on portraiture of inmates from the Psychiatric Hospital of Sant’Antonio Abate. She uses coffee, burned paper, and charcoal on handmade paper with a reductive hand: just as much as media is added, it is then subsequently removed, erased, or burned away… More »

 

LYNDI SALES, Trying to break the cycle, 2018
Acrylic and Ink on Paper and Iridescent Foil, 29 x 18 Inches Framed
$2,800

South Africa based Lyndi Sales’s filigree cut works are inspired by shattered glass experiments, as well as net-like structures that occur in nature. Painting with clear water, and then carefully dropping India ink into the painted area, provides a process of surrender with the outcome always uncontrollable. That surrender for Sales encompasses a letting go of personality traits, our physical bodies, and any knowledge of what the future may bring… 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: