Andrea Claire              Untitled

February 3, 2012 - May 4, 2012

Marfa Country Clinic is pleased to present Untitled, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Andrea Claire.

Believing that abstraction is a mirror for the mind, Claire’s interest in painting is a playful quest for the experience of meta-cognition. While working on several pieces at a time, she lays the paper or linen flat on the hard surface of the worktable. Interested in the visual cavort of color, line, and indeterminate space, the paintings can have many layers, and take the artist anywhere between hours and years to complete. By combining hard-edged geometrical shapes with gestural brushstrokes; elements of deep perspectives with flat all-over applications of paint; raw and purposefully overworked canvas; subtle gradations of grey with areas of solid and bright colors, Claire blurs our usual tools of perception and art historical references.

Some of these paintings can be hanged vertically or horizontally, and this possible rotation only emphasizes their abstractness and lack of grounding in a rational Euclidian space. Rather than creating compositions that would be recognizable based on assumptions, Claire’s work offers an opportunity to subvert expectations. The work is conceptual in that it questions the image-making process and the knowledge necessary to create meaning. The lack of a strategy is the strategy, with the painting becoming a representation of its own process, evidence of time spent.