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KARIN DAVIE |
Karin Davie’s work has been associated with the so-called neo-op movement since she first began exhibiting her loopy stripe paintings in the late 1990s. However, her painterly concerns are more closely allied with gesture and process than with purely optical results. Using diluted oil paint and a soft wide brush, Davie paints wet on wet in broad, swooping strokes that are the result of the movement of her entire body. She associates this physical engagement in the process of painting with dance, counting contemporary choreographer Trisha Brown as an important influence on her work as is the postwar abstraction of Bridget Riley and Frank Stella.
This painting is from a series called Pushed, Pulled, Depleted & Duplicated in which all the works are identically titled but individually numbered. The series is composed of numerous variations on undulating stripes compressed into horizontal and vertical formats. In some paintings, Davie nearly duplicates the curvilinear rhythms of other pictures, creating a postmodern twist on the seeming spontaneity of these gestural abstractions. The curved and contorted whirls of high-keyed color, barely confined by the picture space, have also been associated with the rounded forms of the human body. As such, the bulging out and tunneling in of Davie’s animated stripes take on an emotional intensity that confirms her claim to being a "closet expressionist."
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects