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The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light
at The Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Architecture for Art (click here to see) online video feature
Installation Views
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View 1
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View 2
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Click on any image to enlarge:
SPRING ASPEN, 2010
Oil and wax on panel
25 x 25 inches overall (4 panels, 12 x 12 inches each)
$12,000.
23º8’N, 82º22’W, 2009
Oil and wax on canvas
30 x 61.5 inches overall (2 panels, 30 x 30 inches each)
$16,000.
FADED SWEET PEA, 2008
Oil and wax on wood panel
33 x 33 inches overall (4 panels, 16 x 16 inches each)
$12,000
Appleby is often classified in the art world as a "young" or "emerging" artist, though she has been exhibiting her paintings for more than twenty years since she received her B.F.A. in 1977 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is often shown with that of "reductive" painters, but it does not exactly fit into the "pure" painting philosophy held by many of them. Although Appleby's paintings are composed of abstract panels each essentially a single color, she thinks of them as landscapes.
- Text courtesy of Crown Point Press, publisher of Anne Appleby's prints
Installation view of the paintings.
About the paintings
Anne Appleby's subtly modulated paintings reflect nature's cycles and seasonal changes. With the exception of works titled after seasons or experiences, most of these works are titled after the specific varieties of plants she has chosen to investigate; the grasses, trees, and flowers within the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States.
At first glance, Appleby's paintings appear to be a late-century variation on the rigorous fundamentals of minimalism. These works continue to build upon the minimalist idea of the grid, several staying within her well-known pattern of two to six multi-colored squares, ranging from 12 to 36 inches for each square. Two other works create a different effect, each painting engulfing the viewer in the asymmetrical pairing of two six-foot tall canvases, one 36 inches wide, one 76 inches wide. The intimacy of Appleby's smaller-scale works is replaced by the overwhelming effect of these saturated fields of rich color, which formally refer to doors or windows.
Where her work departs from minimalism is in its quirky nuances. Just as tribal rugs are knowingly woven with a mistake in their pattern to let out evil spirits, Appleby's homemade panels retain imperfections that hint at nature's unpredictable variety and complexity. The impression of a solid and immutable color gives way to the revelation that the paint, while no longer liquid, ebbs and flows in subtle nuances, melding the boundaries between two colors we know are distinct. What and how much she sees, and how she relates it in her reductivist translation, asks more of the viewer's own perceptions of the world than is relevant to most minimalist work.
Layer upon layer of oil paint, each subtly different in color, are successively brushed smooth until Appleby reaches the depth and luminosity she needs to complete her ethereal depiction of a specific plant, season or experience. Each seemingly monochromatic panel reveals a great degree of variation on closer inspection. The entire painting is the sum of a surprising range of color, each suggestive of a bit of information deemed crucial by the artist's patient affinity with her subjects. Her color choices, while not scientific, are indicative of her acute sense of observation. The artist compares her work to the "time-lapse films in which plants break through the ground. You can almost hear the earth making a noise".
Commissions, Honors and Awards
Appleby was an award recipient of the 1999 Biennial Award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. In 1996 award recipient from the esteemed Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, a SFMOMA auxiliary, supporting artists of exceptional promise working independently and at a high level of artistic maturity, but whose work has not yet received substantial recognition. She also received a WESTAF award in the same year. The artist's work is included in the collections of numerous private and public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Anne Appleby is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.
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