Press Release                                                                                     

 

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring new work by Margaret Neill. This is the artist’s fifth exhibition and her first solo show with the gallery.

Neill, like artists throughout history, creates art that simultaneously reveals and reflects her own biography. 

 

“My very first memory is of my ear to my mother’s heart. From the time I could make a conscious choice I have been recreating the sensation of that continuous, repeating flow in my work.”        -        Margaret Neill, 2019

 

Growing up in the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, Neill recalls hours of solitude, her face pressed against a partially open window, the sound and pressure of the wind and the blurred vision of the passing landscape experienced from a moving car. She was transfixed for hours by the hum of the engine, the rush of the air and the ribboning strip of paint that defined the boundary between the road and the landscape beyond.

 

Neill’s inspiration now comes from her daily walks in nature during all kinds of weather and over many types of terrain. She is moved by the lifting fog or the short-lived appearance of a small lake as the snow melts after a winter storm and by the patterns of branching of trees, the wrack lines and waves on the shore, or the momentarily weightlessness of a cormorant or heron moving fluidly through air or water and of her own body, the stretch of her legs and arms keeping her steady and upright in motion or in stillness and the beating of her own heart.

 

Neill is focused on recreating these sensory experiences in painting and drawing. Each work is a journey, or trek with many paths and byways taking place simultaneously. Once begun, all the parts of the work are in continuous play like the various musical instruments in a sextet playing with and against each other. Each painting or drawing begins without notes or plans but emerges from the arc of the artist’s arm and through the medium and materials.

 

The exhibition WAVELENGTH includes ten large paintings, some are exuberant in their multi-colored oil painted surface while others are close tonal works in near monochromatic compositions of graphite and ink. The work investigates the properties of abstract curvilinear forms found in nature and the localized conditions of her environment. The works are both intuitive and analytical in developed drawings and paintings that are composed of deeply layered intersecting geometries.

 

Margaret Neill’s work has been featured in the Wall Street International Magazine, Domino Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, InStyle Magazine and others. Her work can be found in collections throughout the United States including Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, The New York Public Library, New York, NY, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, The New School, New York, NY, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.