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Press Release

Mary McDonnell:
TOUCH

James Graham & Sons is pleased to present "Touch", recent paintings and works on paper by Mary McDonnell in an exhibition that marks the artist's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on exhibit from September 25th through November 14th.

McDonnell is known for the remarkable depth of her oil paintings, using the painstaking process of layering paint in thin turpentine washes to create work that examines the variegated intensity of perception. Her new work includes medium to large ink drawings, small collages on cardboard, and visceral oil paintings on wood and aluminum, up to 12 feet wide.

As a long time birdwatcher, McDonnell has developed a heightened awareness of birdsong, especially in relation to ambient sound, and has transposed this into a kind of musical score with all the vigor, gesture and nuance of this perceptual experience. In works such as Midnight Note(s) and the Blind Why drawings, the viewer moves across the surface like McDonnell, without premeditation or end in mind, following her uncharted gestures as she discovers a wood thrush, veery, or the sputtering pulse of cicadas on an early morning in August.

But there is much more than a meditative hum to these drawings and paintings. McDonnell makes daring leaps into the unknown, becoming an aerialist like the birds she hears, flying back from the picture laid flat against the floor, and circling the perimeter, then diving back into it, using unconventional tools such as bamboo, sticks, brooms, rubber encrusted brushes, and string to rake, score, and grate the surface. Her marks are irregular, crooked, and bristle with tension. Some brushstrokes touch lightly, barely grazing the surface, others collide sharply, or tumble together to form a tangled mass without start or end.

McDonnell's turpentine mixed with water dilutes and undoes marks – creating opposition between hard marks and dissolved form – affirming her sensual exploration, while negating the easy, sentimental line, or balanced figure. We are left with the traces of her perception, as well as our own — a record of choices, the mind left unfurled. As John Yau said in an essay on McDonnell's work, "We cannot stand outside the world and see it, as through a window. We cannot divorce ourselves from our physical circumstances, whatever they might be. There is this world and we are in it and part of it."

Two works on paper by McDonnell were included in the exhibition " New York New Drawings 1946-2007" at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain earlier this year. McDonnell was included in the "Amerika trifft Bayern" 2008 show at Kunst-und Gewerbeverein in Regensburg, Germany. McDonnell is a two-time recipient of a Fellowship to The MacDowell Colony, the 100 year old multi-disciplinary artist residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In 2008 she received an SOS Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 2007 a Residency Fellowship with the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany.

Mary McDonnell was born in Michigan and received her MFA from Syracuse University. McDonnell has been featured in Elle Décor and her work has been reviewed in such publications as ArtNews, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Selected Press

Accumulation, by Marjorie Welish
October 21, 2009
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Mary McDonnell, Village Voice review
September 2009
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