Kenise Barnes Fine Art is delighted to announce the opening of the fall art season with a two-person show featuring new paintings by New York artists Julie Gross and Margaret Neill. As the exhibition title aptly suggests, both painters share a visual language that employs rhythmic undulations of color and form. Neill and Gross are both established artists who have been nourished by and made important contributions to the rich traditions of painterly abstraction and Color Field painting in New York.
Julie Gross is well known for her nearly symmetrical paintings, variants of elongated circles and S-curves. Her newest body of work mines that rich vein, but now Gross stretches the possibilities to their extreme by pulling the shapes until they nearly mimic stripes while still being defined as geometry. Her un-modulated, painted surfaces and her sophisticated color sense unite with barely restrained composure; the compartmentalized colors hum with energy. The artist has degrees in painting from both Pratt Institute and Hunter College in New York. Gross’s work is in the collections of Chase Manhattan Bank, The Bellagio Hotel, Lucent Technologies, Pfizer Corporation, Master Card and MGM Grand, to name a few. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology.
Margaret Neill works from an intuitive process drawing from her embedded experiences, which are sublimated and appear through the process of painting and drawing. The forms just arrive to the artist; she describes this process as a metaphysical exploration of real time space in response to velocity, momentum, and movement through deeply layered intersecting geometries. In her multi-layered abstract paintings and drawings, the viewer is subtly aware of poetic references to nature, music, and weather. The perfectly balanced paintings are built slowly in a meditative process of layering paint or graphite on canvas. Neill earned her MFA from Brooklyn College. Her work can be found in the collections of The New York Public Library, The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Pfizer Corporation, Sofitel Philadelphia and many others. Margaret Neill’s artwork has been featured in InStyle Magazine, The New York Times, Art in America and numerous other publications. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
