New Paintings
September 10- October 26, 2002

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Georgia Marsh, her first in New York since 1994. Her new work combines techniques of printing and painting on richly colored silk panels that are laminated to stretched canvas. Expanding upon the formal conventions of Chinese scroll painting, Greek vase decoration and 18th century wallpaper panels, Marsh's compositions occupy a space between two highly decorative horizontal friezes that frame and compress the central area of each canvas. While the dialogue between abstraction and representation, and the fusion of Western and Eastern painting traditions remain constant themes in her work, Marsh introduces with this exhibition a new narrative direction as well as new media, processes, and materials.

For the past twenty years, Marsh has been attracted to non-western philosophy, literature and traditions of art-making. Chinese landscape painting, in particular, with its emphasis on capturing the essence of nature rather than verisimilitude, is a tangible influence, as are its stylized forms which invite an abstract reading of nature. In her new paintings, Marsh turns her focus to specific features of landscape: flowers, leaves and vines, printing onto silk from the actual plants to capture their forms in meticulous detail.
Interspersed with the profusion of plant forms are digital photographs of both birds in flight and their mechanical analogues: airplanes and helicopters. While birds have symbolized the spirit, transcendence and loss in works by such artists as Ross Bleckner and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, they are also symbols of thwarted freedom and predation, as seen in the photographs and videos of Israeli artist, Michal Rovner. Their metaphorical significance is not lost on Marsh. Through digital editing, she weaves images from the natural world with those that haunt us from media barrage. She allows these symbols of unimaginable power to alternately perforate the calm beauty of the garden, and at other times, to be utterly subsumed by its teeming proliferation.

Georgia Marsh has exhibited her work in New York and Paris, where she lived for over ten years. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Drawing Center, New York; National Museum of American Art, Washington; and the New York Public Library, New York.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday 11 am to 6 pm. For further information, please contact Betsy Senior or Laurence Shopmaker.