Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to announce the new exhibition featuring painters Susan English, Julie Gross, and Audrey Stone. All three women have distinguished careers centered around their use of color and abstraction.
Susan English’s paintings are rich in their sophisticated vocabulary of color and surface. By expertly pouring layers of tinted polymer paints, English has arrived at a body of work whose minimalist appearance belies their complexities.
Through a series of planned pours and the manipulation of smooth aluminum panels, English both directs and anticipates how the paint will accumulate, disperse, resist, and form its own small abstractions. English makes her paintings through process, intention, experience, and chance. The thickness and viscosity of the paint dictates the subtleties in appearance and the intensity of each color. Her paintings’ surfaces range from matte to medium or high gloss, each variously absorbing or reflecting light.
English’s color choices represent an intersection of outside and inside. Often her painting’s palette comes from an experience of a place or moment in time. Inside the highly charged realm of color, the artist’s responses and choices are visual, emotional, and intuitive. She is interested in the phenomenon of a color at the limit of itself. How far can green be pushed before it becomes blue? How many infinite directions can you push a brown or a gray or a white? In this tertiary area, colors hum like a harmony contained in a single note.
Susan English’s paintings have been widely exhibited in galleries and at art fairs. She has been honored with the following awards and residencies: NYSS Mercedes Matter Award, Ucross Foundation Residency, Ucross, Wyoming, Saltonstall Foundation Fellow, Ithaca, NY, HFA Artists Residency, Garrison, New York. English has been featured in The New York Times, White Hot Magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few. She earned an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from Hamilton College. The artist lives and works in New York.
Julie Gross’s paintings contrast rhythmic color and forms based on sine waves or ‘s’ curves. By bifurcating, multiplying or segmenting forms this work continues an engagement with images in flux and stasis as well as spatial and temporal perceptual play. There is also an interest in tension between the elusive and the concrete.
An expert colorist, Gross’s choice of hue carries each shape’s energy forward. Color value, intensity, and temperature enable optimal variety of interaction and surprising combinations. Within the composition, each form’s flat surface is a powerful communicator of movement and spatial location adding weight and equilibrium against the linear momentum of the colored bands.
Gross’s work has been widely shown throughout the United States. She has been honored with residencies including BAU Institute, Otranto Italy, Residency, Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, Wyoming,
MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga Springs, NY, Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, New York and others. She was the recipient of Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant and Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic, Working Fellowship. Gross’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, Arts Magazine, and Art News, to name a few. Julie Gross earned an MA from Hunter College, New York, NY and BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She lives and works in New York City.
Audrey Stone is known for her elegant abstract geometric paintings and for her expertise with color. In Stone’s paintings, she explores the boundaries between broad and narrow bands of adjacent colors to generate visual vibration. Intrigued by the way the eye and brain process these transitions, the artist is engaged in the viewer’s emotional and physical responses. Beyond color and composition, underlying themes tie the paintings together: the giving and receiving of information; concepts of infinity and containment; equality; relationship of self to others. 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.
Stone’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, and in Japan, England, and Austria. Her work is in the collections of the Ameritas Foundation (Sophia, Bulgaria), Cleveland Clinic, Copelouzos Art Museum (Athens, Greece), Credit Suisse, Fidelity Investments, New York Presbyterian Hospital, to name a few. She has been honored with several residencies including Surf Point Foundation Residency, York, ME, and Artist’s Space/Artist’s Grants, Artist’s Space, New York, NY. Stone is a frequent lecturer, and her work has been features on numerous podcasts and articles including Artist and Place Podcast, New American Paintings, The Journal of Mathematics and The Arts, Rural Intelligence, The New York Times, and W Magazine. Audrey Stone earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY and a BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Stone has exhibited with the gallery since 2019. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Please contact Lani Holloway, Associate Director, Lani@kbfa.com, 860 560 3085 with inquires or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.
