With very different visual results Hoferer and Hobler-Keene distill details and incidents from daily experience to something beautiful and essential. What lies between the imagery, the calm that happens in the quiet spaces is equal to the imagery itself. Their attention to the dialogue and rhythm between positive and negative space unites them conceptually.
Marietta Hoferer makes eloquent minimal compositions on paper using delicate materials. Hoferer begins with a penciled grid drawn on paper. This new series of 38 x 38 inch works on paper originate from a simple system of parallel pencil lines each separated by a single inch. The artist uses white artist tape, transparent and semi-transparent tapes to build structured drawings. Between the penciled structures Hoferer draws with various tapes. Bits of air and artifacts from the studio such as lint or fingerprints become trapped under the surface and are an integral part of the work. They are evidence of human presence and the physicality of the process. As light plays over the surface lines appear and disappear, subtle color is found and lost. The light and its interplay are central to the work.
Hoferer lives and works in Manhattan. She has work in the collection of Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, has been awarded many grants and fellowships including from The Edward Albee Foundation and Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Spain. She shows throughout the untied Sates and Europe. Hoferer has an MFA from Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin.
Heather Hobler-Keene cuts into the edges of her paintings with a scroll saw deconstructing the notion of the picture frame. Meticulously cutting, painting and reassembling the composition the conversation is both inside and outside the picture frame. The lush casein painted surface is animated by organic and biomorphic shapes nudging bumping into and having conversations with one another. The emphasis on what is missing as well as what is seen.
In the project space are drawings by Heather Hobler-Keene. In this series of drawings called Tracings by Hobler-Keene the artist follows the flow and journey of other artists hands. Using her personal collection of catalogues and magazines the artist explores her own process of looking at reproductions. She has made a series of lovingly traced drawings on vellum, pulling bits of color and text from the original sources. Through the process of reconstructing the drawings, the artist and viewer discover the secrets of their seductions.
Heather Hobler-Keene lives and works in Boston. She has shown at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, The Rose Museum, Brandeis University, MA and at many galleries in Boston and New York. She is a graduate of Tufts University and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.