Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings

Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings artlover608

Lundsfryd, lego, 2005-06, oil and pencil on canvas.

NEW YORK.- From April 17th to May 12th , 2007, Lori Bookstein Fine Art will present Tine Lundsfryd: Recent Paintings. The 15 square or near-square canvases comprise her second solo show at the gallery, and continue her exploration of abstract geometric form using unexpected palettes. After first laying down a graphite grid onto the surface, the artist uses its vertical, horizontal and diagonal axes as an armature from which to build up more complex forms. Variously-shaped triangles and quadrangles, and the eight-pointed star, remain her building blocks, but she has introduced the motifs of pinwheels and puzzle-like pieces to her most recent work. Both playful and mathematical, Lundsfryd's patterning derives its structures from sources high and low, religious and secular. On a trip to her native Denmark last year, the artist encountered early-Christian eternity symbols in an 11th century church, whose intersecting circles she then incorporated into her canvases. Domestic Dutch tiles, as well as Islamic and Hindu tiles and ornaments, also inform her painting. Lundsfryd avoids horizontal- or vertical-shaped supports, finding them to be too laden with connotations of landscape or portraiture. Similarly, her color choices, which vary from clear, bright reds and blues to murky browns and neutrals, tend to be about conveying abstract ideas rather than emotional states. There is something scientific about the way the artist tests out one color against another: through juxtapositions, layering, and mixing the artist creates myriad combinations. Viewed at a distance, Lundsfryd's forms appear to be hard-edged particles, but a closer inspection reveals that each component is made up of visible brushstrokes with sensuous, imperfect borders. The layers of paint are often thin enough to allow an area's previous iterations of color to show through, as well as the underlying grid—a kind of linear, modern-day pentimenti. This semi-opacity fosters a reading of the fractured planes not as pure geometric modeling, but as a negotiation between spatial depth and the flat lushness of the painted surface. In his review of her 2004 exhibition, Mario Naves wrote that there is " something meditative about the gentle and tenacious way that Ms. Lundsfryd applies oil to canvas—something skeptical, too. That the pictures embody contradictory impulses without straining attests to Ms. Lundsfryd's ability to endow limited form with manifold meaning." The artist herself has said that the work is about "disorder and rebuilding"—and, indeed, whether the images are meant to be coming together or shattering apart, there is a unified quality about them. Simply put, Lundsfryd takes "broken information" and "makes it whole." Tine Lundsfryd was born in 1964 in Nyk óbing, Falster, Denmark. From 1984 to 1987 she studied under the artist Carsten Dinnsen, while concurrently attending courses at the Anthroposophical Society in Copenhagen. She joined the Vaerksted 82 (Studio 82) in 1987, an artist collective consisting of ten young artists working together in a shared studio space. In 1990 Lundsfryd was the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the American Women's Club in Denmark, the Danish-American Foundation and the King Frederik and Queen Ingrids' Fund for Humanitarian and Cultural Purposes. That year she mo ved to New York City, where she studied at the New York Studio School (1990-92); later receiving her MFA in painting at the Parsons School of Design (1995). She has exhibited at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; Artpage Gallery, New York ; Diamantina Gallery, New York; and the ISA, Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy, among others. Group shows include the CMP Gallery, Washington, DC; Sideshow Gallery, New York; Artist's Space, New York; and A.I.R. Gallery, New York. In 2000 the artist received the Cultural Award from the American Scandinavian Society. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.