Meulensteen

In 2011 Meulensteen presented DRMN’, an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Pibal. The show is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Robert Storr. In this series of paintings, Pibal continues to explore the possibilities of her medium through her abstract geometric compositions. As the artist explains about her process, “rather than settling on certain motifs, the work develops as a rolling question.” Pibal’s acrylic on aluminum paintings are at once brainy and open-ended, hard-edged and intimate. The exhibition comprises paintings rendered on a small domestic scale, although Pibal occasionally conducts her explorations in color and line in a larger format. Though the work appears at first to result from calculated design, Pibal relies instead on a process of improvisation. While the paintings seem to adhere to a strict geometry, upon closer inspection they reveal subtle yet determined deviations. The works on view exemplify the razorsharp refinement of Pibal’s palette and her banded, muscular compositions. In several of her most recent works, brusque brushstrokes bump up against crisp, masked edges. Pibal is primarily interested in painting as a way of thinking. Without privileging one source over another, her work alludes to the robust history of abstract painting, architecture, and graphic design, as well as landscape and the sublime. Though particular narratives and experiences serve as impetus for certain works, none are illustrations of life. Nevertheless, they do draw from the natural world in their sense of infinite space, the line of the horizon, and in the artist’s attempt to capture a transitional, crepuscular sense of light. In all its facets, the work implies a certain shifting, non-settling, ongoing process. Each painting offers a wealth of possibilities, forever opening up to a world larger than itself. Ann Pibal’s work has been included in exhibitions at numerous museums and galleries, including MoMA PS1, MASS MoCA, The Tang Museum at Skidmore College, The Suburban in Chicago, Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam, Petra Rinck Galerie in Düsseldorf, and dePury and Luxembourg in Zurich. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Colby College Museum of Art, among others. Pibal has received awards and grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work is also included in Robert Nickas’s Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, published in 2009 by Phaidon. Pibal lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and North Bennington, VT, where she teaches painting at Bennington College. Upcoming exhibitions at Meulensteen October Main Gallery: Richard DeVore Project Space: Contemporary ceramics group show, curated by Annabeth Rosen November-December Main Gallery: Siebren Versteeg Project Space: Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu For additional

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