Radical Chrome
Mary Judge, Jenny Kemp, Julie Maren, Joanne Mattera, Audrey Stone
Radical Chrome presents five contemporary artists whose work centers on expert and specific use of color as an important and primary force in their work. Their paintings and sculpture explore the possibilities of harmony, friction, movement, and emotional impact inherent in shifts of chroma, hue and tone.
Mary Judge is widely known for her paintings and powdered pigment drawings. Radical Chrome unveils Judge’s newest series of pigment drawings titled Primavera Pop and a grouping of small oil paintings. Her compositions of ordered symmetry and rich vibrant colors are powerful and elegant. Mary Judge's work explores the diagrammatic, the topological, the three-dimensional aspects of the drawing both through a linear/planar and tonal atmospheric representation of form, as a way of exploring what seems like a lost territory between image and object.
Mary Judge’s work has been exhibited widely in the Unites States, Italy, Switzerland, and Israel and is in numerous public and private collections including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, The British Museum, London, England, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, Permanent Collection of the US Embassy, Kazakhstan, NYU Langone Health, New York, NY. She earned a BFA from Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, and Rome, Italy. The artist lives and works in the metropolitan New York area.
Jenny Kemp’s vibrant paintings concentrate on line and pattern as conduits for trains of thought. Exploring intuition through varying winds of linear forms, she reflects on phenomena of time, growth, and notions of beauty through abstractions that often hint at figuration. Her spaces are rhythmic as lines and forms converse in a reactionary way where relationships are tested through accumulations of modulating color. In that way, her process is that of searching, looking to early visionary abstractionists and slowly building relationships until the painting’s individual personality is found.
Jenny Kemp received her BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and an MFA in Painting from the University at Albany. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country. Featured publications include 100 Painters of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson, New American Paintings, The Huffington Post, New York Times, Chronogram, and The New England Review. She is a recipient of the NYFA fellowship in painting and the 2015 Emerging Artist Award recipient from the Art Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY. She also sits on the board of Collar Works, a nonprofit art space dedicated to the support of emerging artists in Troy, NY through which she is involved in launching the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works in Granville, NY.
Julie Maren has been focused on her “Biophilia” installation artwork for the past several years. These installations are both wall sculpture and three-dimensional paintings and translate the omnipresent dot patterns in her canvases into expansive, multidimensional sculptural arrangements of color and pattern. The work sets up a dichotomy by using natural materials, such as acorn tops, mica, and minerals in contrast with synthetic, often electric paint colors, glass beads or glitter. In each work, hundreds of inventively varied small components are gathered in graceful compositions setting up a dialogue between microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. These wall installations are transformed by light, their glinting elements and shadows becoming integral parts of the artwork.
A Colorado native, Julie Maren earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has illustrated two children's books for Dial/Penguin Books and received major grants from the Colorado Commission on the Arts and the Boulder Arts Commission. She was commissioned for a public sculpture in Boulder's Pearl Street pedestrian mall. The artist attended sculpture symposiums in Wellington, New Zealand, Bangalore, India, and Marble, Colorado. Most recently, Maren, co-founder of The Women's Art League, was featured in a short film with Judy Chicago, “The Famous Women Dinner Service: In Conversation with Contemporary Art” by the Yale Center for British Art, film by Jonathan Law and Hana Leaper for British Art Studies journal, published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art.
Joanne Mattera is exhibiting a new series titled Tutto in this exhibition. Tutto continues the formal themes the artist has been working with for the past several years: a divided field, a strong emphasis on the horizontal, and saturated color. In the Tutto series (Italian for “everything”) the artist chooses to explore ideas using all her experience with media such as velvety gouache, luscious oil stick, and the luminous wax of encaustic for these large acrylic paintings.
Joanne Mattera is the foremost expert in the field of encaustic painting and is the founder and former director of the International Encaustic Conference. Her artwork is in the collections of The New Britain Museum of Contemporary Art, US Embassies in Slovenia and Poland, US State Department, Bank of America, and Norwegian Cruise Lines, to name a few, as well as numerous private collections. Mattera writes a contemporary art blog, she is a frequent guest speaker and curator and is a member of American Abstract Artists (NYC). The artist lives and works in MA and in NYC.
Audrey Stone says, “Observing shifting color and light in nature is an ecstatic experience for me. I find myself simultaneously excited and calm, a dynamic opposition I seek to generate in my work through the interplay of line and subtle gradients of color.” Stone uses the boundaries between broad and narrow bands of adjacent colors to generate visual vibration. She is intrigued by the way the eye and brain process these transitions, informing the viewer’s emotional and physical responses. Beyond color and composition, underlying themes tie the paintings together into series: the giving and receiving of information; concepts of infinity and containment; equality; relationship of self to others; and more recently, death, loss, and absence. Although these subjects are not meant to be absolute in the work, they play a part in both the conception and the process of making.
Audrey Stone is an artist, curator, and lecturer. Her work has been included in the New York Times, Rural Intelligence, New American Paintings, Cool Hunting, BOOOOOOOM, and numerous other publications. Her work is in the collections of Ameritas Foundation, Sophia, Bulgaria, Cleveland Clinic, Copelouzos Art Museum, Athens, Greece, Credit Suisse, Fidelity Investments, New York Presbyterian Hospital, to name a few. The artist lives and works in New York.
Please contact Kenise Barnes, director: Kenise@kbfa.com with inquires or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.
