Dear Friends,

Welcome to the blog for the Marcia Wood Gallery. This new blog is our way of staying in touch with you in a more personal manner than we can do on our website (though we hope you’ll visit it, too). Since the blog is new, it will surely evolve. For now, we’ve got updates on what our artists have been doing—we’re posting new information weekly—and what we’re doing as a gallery in terms of fairs and travel. Eventually we hope to include interviews with our artists, and some first-person pieces, maybe even special projects, by our artists and gallery friends.

 

If you’re going to be in New York at the end of the month, come by and say Hey. We’ll be at the Pulse Fair, booth #I-12.

Best,

Marcia

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Joanne Mattera

 
Uttar 291, 2006, encaustic on panel, 48 x50 inches, in three panels
Joanne Mattera 2007 News 

Curated Luxe, Calme et Volupte: A Meditation on Visual Pleasure, at 14-artist exhibit for the gallery, which focused on beauty in contemporary art.

. You can see the catalog online at http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/luxe_calme/index.html

. Read Joanne’s essay at http://www.marciawoodgallery.com/luxe_calme/essay.html

. Review: Debra Wolf in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 2007: "Order and beauty form the organizing principle in an engaging new exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery....Using Baudelaire and Matisse as a springboard for contemporary expression, Mattera's premise is both clever and effective. Fastidious process (order) is essential to aesthetic outcome (beauty). Mattera's selections are smart and pleasing in a show that combines control and creativity, visual and tactile harmony, and individual refrains of luxe, calme et volupte....Verdict: Intelligent and pleasurable."

  

Uttar 290, 2005 encaustic on panel, 35 x 35 inches

20th Career solo at OK Harris Gallery, New York, in April

. Review: Maureen Mullarkey, The New York Sun, May 3, 2007:   “If Jasper Johns put encaustic back on the map in the 1950’s and ‘60s, Joanne Mattera has been a prime mover in making the technique accessible to a new generation of painters. . .The medium itself is very much the subject of Silk Road, Ms. Mattera’s series of small encaustic panels. Each panel is a simple expanse of what appears, at quick glance, to be a single color. But owing to the opalescent properties of pigmented beeswax applied in layers, these radiant fields are irreducible to monochrome. . .resonance from within lends depth to understated surface patterns. Viewed in ensemble, there is nothing minimal about them.”

. Review: Joseph Walentiny, Abstract Art Online, May 15, 2007: “Mattera combines conceptual order, as embodied in the structure of the grid, with beauty.”

Work appears in Geoform, an online curatorial project focused on geometric form and structure in contemporary abstract art. A 2005 interview with Joanne by the editor Julie Karabenick was expanded in 2007. You can read the revised interview at http://www.geoform.net/features/features_mattera.html

Joanne Mattera Art Blog covers artists, exhibitions and art events around the country, including the recent fairs in Miami. You can read more at www.joannemattera.blogspot.com

Founded the National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass. The first and only event of its kind, this conference attracted participants from throughout North America, for three days of panels, lectures and demonstrations. Joanne continues for 2008 as conference director.

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