ANN ASPINWALL: SPIRIT OF PLACE

June 14 — July 14, 2019

Opening reception: Friday, June 14, 6 – 8 p.m.

McKenzie Fine Art

55 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002

New York, NY (LOWER EAST SIDE) Garvey|Simon, in collaboration with McKenzie Fine Art, is pleased to present Ann Aspinwall: Spirit of Place, an exhibition of the artist’s recent work in silkscreen, etching, linocut, and collagraph. Limiting herself to the minimal elements of undulating parallel lines and a few carefully selected colors, Aspinwall creates luminous expanses that are suggestive of landscape, water, and sky. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition in New York and the first collaboration between Garvey|Simon and McKenzie Fine Art. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by independent curator Marilyn Symmes.  The opening reception will take place on Friday, June 14, 6–8 pm, at McKenzie Fine Art. The artist will be present.

Ann Aspinwall: Spirit of Place features several new works created specifically for this exhibition, including Ray I–III, 2019, a vibrant large-scale series of editioned prints; Twine, 2018, and Ray (Aqua, Peridot, Citrine, and Copper), 2019, two series of unique hand-colored linocuts. Other works include Spumante, 2017, and Ambra, 2018, immense linocuts measuring nearly five feet in width. While Spumante and Ambra are printed from the same matrix, their different color schemes produce dramatically distinct effects. Tessuto Veneziano, 2010—an elegant and intimate suite of five diptychs created with etching and chine collé—illustrates the origins of Aspinwall’s fascination with lines and color, and harkens back to her time spent apprenticing in a print studio in Venice in the late 1990s.

About Tessuto Veneziano, Aspinwall wrote, “I adhered to a certain principle. I drew one freehand line as straight as possible. Under that line I drew another, following as closely as I could the one above it. Each successive line followed the line directly above, imitating all the curves and shakes. These imperfections, or deviations from the original line, became more and more prominent, each line being an interpretation of what came before it.” While Aspinwall’s works have continued to stem from that practice, they have evolved significantly: the scale has increased, the lines have loosened, and the colors have become much bolder. Aspinwall recognized the potential in this method for evoking the topographical features of an imagined terrain. She achieves optical effects of highlights, shadows, depth, and movement through variations of line density and her meticulous choice of colors.

Aspinwall works primarily in print mediums because they afford her a means of realizing the quality of line and saturation of color that are essential to her work. She also takes advantage of the capacity for multiple impressions by using her matrix over and over to print color variations of the same composition, rendering impressions of different times of day or season.

Ann Aspinwall (born 1976, New York) received her MA in art history from the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 1998, and studied printmaking at studios in Scotland and Italy. She went on to work as a print specialist at the New York Public Library and then as a master printer at Pace Editions in New York. In 2012, Aspinwall and Knut Willich founded Aspinwall Editions, a fine art print publisher and studio in New York. Aspinwall’s work is in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Yale University Art Gallery, the New York Public Library, and the Smith College Museum of Art.

Please contact Liz Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or by phone at 917.796.2146 for high res images or more information.