Anita Rogers Gallery is pleased to announce Joan Waltemath: Fecund Algorithms, an exhibition of new paintings from the artist’s Torso/Roots series.
Fecund Algorithms introduces a new collection of paintings in a range of unique materials including oil, graphite, and various metallic and florescent pigments on aluminum panels, many of which take years for the artist to complete. Titled with anagrammatic terms, the series Torso/ Roots grapples with the complex and inextricable relationships between the human body and the mind, the physical and the spiritual, and art, architecture and the natural world. The pieces, at once bold and rich with subtleties, are vertically structured and based on a grid derived from harmonic mathematical relationships. Due to the reflective and absorbent nature of the pigments the artist chooses, new details emerge from the works as they are viewed from different perspectives and at various times of day; in this way, every interaction with one of the panels is a new experience. The works demand a physical reaction from the viewer, keeping them consistently aware, awake and engaged.
Born in 1953 in Nebraska, Waltemath received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from Hunter College in New York. Her work has been shown in New York, Chicago, Portland, Baltimore, London, Basel and Cologne and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Harvard University Art Museum, among others. She has written extensively on art and served as editor-at-large of the Brooklyn Rail since 2001. She taught at the IS Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union from 1997 to 2010 and Princeton University between 2000-9. She currently lives and works in New York and is the Director of MICA’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting.