ARTISTS
Maureen Dougherty: Borrowed Time
Cheim & Read is pleased to present Maureen Dougherty: Borrowed Time, an exhibition of new work by the Manhattan-based painter and filmmaker. The show will open on July 11, 2023, at the gallery鈥檚 Chelsea location, 547 West 25th Street, and run through September 16. This is the artist鈥檚 first solo exhibition with the gallery.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maureen Dougherty traveled to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she joined a colleague to collaborate on a documentary film project. She had planned to be away from New York for about a month. The ensuing lockdown instead kept her in Pittsfield for more than two years. A longtime abstract painter, she found a small room that she could use as a studio and began to make meditative ink drawings at five o鈥檆lock each morning. These drawings would incrementally develop into figurative imagery, taking her art in a wholly new direction.
The artist has noted that 鈥減ainting is like a clock 鈥� it has a sense of time.鈥� It can move forward or, as in the works of Nicolas Poussin, it can stop and become eternal. She believes that our times call for a form of anti-fascist 鈥渄egenerate鈥� art 鈥� a perception that has intuitively led her to freely improvise on appropriated images from the OnlyFans porn hub. These paintings, focusing on lips, eyes, tongues, and teeth, on masked faces and bodies glomming onto one another, underscore the lengths that a human being often needs to go, in an alienating and polarized society, simply to feel alive.
The legacy of modernist figuration, from Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, and Kees van Dongen to Walt Kuhn and Alex Katz, simmers beneath the surface, yet her paintings possess a 21st-century touch and aura completely their own. With her parallel practice as a filmmaker exploring the social and political currents of the day, coupled with her upbringing in Schenectady, New York, a territory occupied by the Mohawk Nation for more than 1000 years before it was settled by the Dutch in 1661, she is invariably aware of art鈥檚 role both inside and outside history鈥檚 continuum.
Cheim & Read is pleased to present Maureen Dougherty: Borrowed Time, an exhibition of new work by the Manhattan-based painter and filmmaker. The show will open on July 11, 2023, at the gallery鈥檚 Chelsea location, 547 West 25th Street, and run through September 16. This is the artist鈥檚 first solo exhibition with the gallery.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maureen Dougherty traveled to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she joined a colleague to collaborate on a documentary film project. She had planned to be away from New York for about a month. The ensuing lockdown instead kept her in Pittsfield for more than two years. A longtime abstract painter, she found a small room that she could use as a studio and began to make meditative ink drawings at five o鈥檆lock each morning. These drawings would incrementally develop into figurative imagery, taking her art in a wholly new direction.
The artist has noted that 鈥減ainting is like a clock 鈥� it has a sense of time.鈥� It can move forward or, as in the works of Nicolas Poussin, it can stop and become eternal. She believes that our times call for a form of anti-fascist 鈥渄egenerate鈥� art 鈥� a perception that has intuitively led her to freely improvise on appropriated images from the OnlyFans porn hub. These paintings, focusing on lips, eyes, tongues, and teeth, on masked faces and bodies glomming onto one another, underscore the lengths that a human being often needs to go, in an alienating and polarized society, simply to feel alive.
The legacy of modernist figuration, from Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, and Kees van Dongen to Walt Kuhn and Alex Katz, simmers beneath the surface, yet her paintings possess a 21st-century touch and aura completely their own. With her parallel practice as a filmmaker exploring the social and political currents of the day, coupled with her upbringing in Schenectady, New York, a territory occupied by the Mohawk Nation for more than 1000 years before it was settled by the Dutch in 1661, she is invariably aware of art鈥檚 role both inside and outside history鈥檚 continuum.
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Cheim & Read is opening Maureen Dougherty: Borrowed Time, an exhibition of new work by the Manhattan-based painter and filmmaker. The show starts July 11, 2023, at the gallery鈥檚 Chelsea location, 547 West 25th Street, and runs through September 16.
While Maureen Dougherty is mostly known as an abstractionist, she studied figurative painting, and has returned to it time and again throughout her career.
Since its formation in 1963, the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture has instilled in its pupils the importance of technical painterly prowess.
