FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Through April 12, 2008

KATE JAVENS

March 6 - April 12, 2008

Opening Reception:
Thursday, March 6, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Marcia Wood gallery presents a solo exhibition of transcendental paintings by Kate Javens from her renowned Named For series. Included in the exhibit will be new works made especially for the Marcia Wood Gallery exhibit as well as works direct from Javen's blockbuster museum exhibition, American Beasts, on view at the Blanden Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa, through February 16, 2008.

Javen's exquisite paintings of animals are about much more than what is immediately apparent to the eye. As the scholar Alan Burdick writes in his essay for the catalog of Javen’s exhibition at the Blanden Art Museum, “It is tempting to view her paintings as depictions of animals. In fact, and far more remarkably, what she exposes are the brief moments of time through which the creatures are passing."

Javen’s paintings in oil on wood, linen, and muslin, are stunning both for the breathtaking beauty of her brushstroke as well as for their passionate moral intensity. In a painting style that synthesizes an Old Masters clarity of light with a basis in American naturalism and realism, Javens connects with the viewer by an empathy to her subjects; paintings of animals which are named for, and in fact stand as metaphorical portraits of, figures in American history. "The images that result are the opposite of Old World still-lifes; there is something urgent, almost Transcendental, about them." (Alan Burdick, et al) Javen's interest in social history, and the surprising obscurity of people who led inspiringly altruistic and effective lives, “...so extreme in their humanity, and so influential in defining who we are at our best..." (Kate Javens, 2007), has led her to name her animal paintings for some of these enlightened beings, in the ongoing body of work entitled Named For.

Kate Javens was born in Missouri and spent her childhood in Japan, Mexico, and the bicoastal United States. She attended Pennsylvania State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Javens is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Painting Fellow, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts Disciplinary Winner in Painting, and a three-time MacDowell Fellow. Her works are held in private and public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University, theTelfair Museum of Art and The Blanden Museum of Art. She lives and works in New York City.