PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Joanne Mattera: Pure Color

April 20- May 27, 2006
Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, April 20, 6 to 9 pm
Castleberry Art Stroll: Friday, April 21, 7 to 10 pm

In her third solo exhibition at the Marcia Wood Gallery, New York artist Joanne Mattera shows paintings from her new series, Silk Road, and the most recent paintings from her longtime series, Uttar. Both series are united by pure color—a palette of radiant and translucent hues—and an abiding reference to the grid.

Describing her work as “lush minimalism,” Mattera mines a vein that is succulent in hue while reductive in image. In her new Silk Road series, she pushes those elements to the extreme. Each painting is a luminous monochrome achieved by layers of translucent paint applied at successive right angles; the subtlest of grids is formed by a trail of brushmarks or intentionally grainy elements within the paint. Mattera has limned each painting to heighten the intensity of its color field. Sizes range from an intimate 12-by-12-inches to midsize panels, also square. The title Silk Road was suggested by the texture and iridescence of woven silk cloth.

The Uttar series, begun in late 2000, consists now of nearly 300 paintings that range from small individual panels of 12 by 12 inches to multipanel works that are over four feet in either direction. These latter are among Mattera’s newest. Regular visitors to the Marcia Wood Gallery, or to the gallery’s booth at the AAF Contemporary Art Fair in New York City, are familiar with the elements of this series: ever-recombinant grids composed of blocks or stacks of color. Critic Lilly Wei, writing in the essay Geometry Reloaded, called Mattera’s painting “voluptuous,” noting that the encaustic, worked loosely and fluidly within the grid, appears “to melt down…into pure, irresistible paint.”

Mattera is a nationally acknowledged master of encaustic, which has a refulgence and materiality that is unique among painting mediums. Her book, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax, has become the standard reference on the subject, and she lectures widely on the topic.

Mattera is a 2005 recipient of the Artist’s Resource Trust Grant, administered by the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. She is the subject of On and Off the Grid: In Conversation with Joanne Mattera, an interview with Julie Karabenick, which appeared in the 2005 March/April issue of NYArts. Her work is included in the just-published Abstract Painting: Concepts and Techniques, by Vicky Perry (Watson-Guptill, New York).