PASt
exhibitionS
Mary Lovelace O'Neal
“Adventures & Misadventures; The Art of Mary Lovelace
O'Neal ”
Press
Release
About
the Artist
Slide
Show
Exhibition
Thursday, October 11- Thursday, november 24 2007
Reception
Thursday, October 11 2007, 5:30 - 8:00 p.m
Gallery Hours
Tuesday-Saturday, 11-5:30 p.m.
Open until 8:00 p.m. on first Thursday of the month
Adventures & Misadventures;
The Art of Mary Lovelace O’Neal will feature large-scale
paintings, mixed-media drawings, as well as a stunning array of
her works
created over the past 40 years including Meaningless Ritual, Senseless
Superstition, and Requiem for a Daffodil. O’Neal’s
exhibit at San Francisco’s
Togonon Gallery stands to celebrate an accomplished artistic career
creating visceral, bold, and telling paintings that as gallery
director Julina Togonon notes are “ provocative compositions
which reiterate the significance of Mary’s work in the realm
of Expressionism. This upcoming exhibition, ”Togonon says “recognizes
O’Neal as one of the foremost
female African-American abstract expressionists and represents
new possibilities within her work – Mary has moved from abstraction
to stronger elements of representation and figuration, a style
with which she has admittedly played hide and seek over her long
career.”
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1942,
entered into a visual discourse with the art world in the mid-1960s,
today she has positioned herself in a landscape of accomplished painters
whose careers continue to thrive well into the 21st century. As a
young woman steeped in 1960s Civil Rights politics and studying art
at Howard University, O’Neal captured the attention of her
professors and colleagues alike. By the 1980s O’Neal had created
a body of work that had been exhibited and collected around the world.
Today, recently retired as Chair of UC Berkeley’s
Department of Art Practice, O’Neal notes, “I now have
everyone and everything extraneous out of my studio. Like a child
who gets her first set of crayons and drawing paper, I am painting
with great abandon. It’s a marvelous feeling to be free of
any constraints. I don’t worry about anything I make anymore.
The figures are present, showered and powdered, and ready to work…they’re
in plain sight, fully clothed and in their right minds. Now, I make
what strikes
my fancy. I can and do violate even my own rules. It’s the
freest I’ve ever been – I’m absolutely
and finally maximizing my freedom.”
Dubbed everything from feisty, deliberate and audacious, to quietly
assertive, charming and most often agreed upon by critics and colleagues,
an accomplished artist and consummate storyteller, O’Neal’s
paintings elicit a similar power. They are as she notes, not stories
unto themselves, but part of a larger life view. Trained and mentored
by artist, art historian, collector and curator David C. Driskell,
O’Neal’s
work has grown over the years to embody two major streams of American
art, Abstract Expressionism along with Minimalist constructs. O’Neal’s
current work, primarily that of acrylics and mixed media on canvas
and paper, shows a continuum of self-definition, a conscious refusal
to become a mannerist. The new images featured in the Togonon Gallery’s
Adventures & Misadventures; The Art of Mary Lovelace O’Neal
exhibition, conspire to call forth a
brilliance and style complimentary of this painter’s great
strength of conviction, tenacity, and talent.
Times, politics, and O’Neal’s painting style have evolved
over the past 40 years since she attended Howard University, received
a prestigious scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting
and Sculpture in 1963, and completed her M.F.A, on scholarship at
Columbia University as the only African-American in her class in
1968. O’Neal went on to study with Robert Blackburn, becoming
an accomplished printmaker, which lead to residences in Morocco,
France
and Chile, she was the recipient of numerous awards for her work
including, the 1993 Artiste
en France Award and the 2006 Brandywine Distinguished Artist Award,
and eventually after many years teaching became Chair the UC Berkeley’s
Department of Art Practice, retiring in 2006. O’Neal, no longer
busy teaching, is once-again creating new works with fervor, and
the upcoming exhibition
at the Togonon Gallery is a window into
a magical world of success and achievement, a glimpse at an artist
conjuring new adventures with zeal.
|
