Opening: Saturday, Oct. 20th 2-5pm

Exhibition dates: October 20th - November 17th, 2018

Georgia Scherman Projects presents Amplitude of the Infinite, the gallery's fourth solo show with artist Melanie Authier.

Melanie Authier’s canvases bring viewers into a caterwaul of form, but also of competing histories. Citing High Modernist Abstraction in both her hard-edge and gestural painting, Authier positions herself at the interstices of a visual contradiction. But other binaries figure in, as well: the synthetic and the organic, the technological and the natural, flatness and depth, the atmospheric and the geological. Dynamisms mingle and co-exist in an exchange that stretches the limits of their allusions.

“I believe my work references and, at times, wrestles with the after-burn of painting’s past, art history with a capital ‘A’,” she reflects. “So my preoccupying question is, ‘Where do we go from here?’” With a dialectical approach that roots down into the brush, each work “sets up a problem,” with Authier working through the possibility of irresolution as her response. As such, her paintings churn up art’s freighted histories, with Authier shifting her weight between chaos and control.

In accompaniment to Authier’s seven-gallery touring exhibition Contrarieties and Counterpoints (2016-18), a catalogue essay by Sky Goodden describes the painter as baroque for her conversation between exterior and interior, and for her paintings’ roiling sympathies, elasticities, and their “willing loss of form.”Goodden writes, “She produces romantic gesture, unlikely light, allaying cimmerian weight, and then crashing forms, sinking comment into vortex, erupting color from the deep.”