Art exhibit opens Friday at Marfa Country Clinic

MARFA – Marfa Country Clinic is pleased to present Untitled, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Andrea Claire.

A reception for Claire, a former Chinati Foundation artist in residence in 2000, is from 5-7pm Friday at the clinic, 105 East Oak Street, near the post office.

Believing that abstraction is a mirror for the mind, Claire’s interest in painting is a playful quest for the experience of meta-cognition. While working on several pieces at a time, she lays the paper or linen flat on the hard surface of the worktable.

Interested in the visual cavort of color, line, and indeterminate space, the paintings can have many layers, and take the artist anywhere between hours and years to complete.

By combining hard-edged geometrical shapes with gestural brushstrokes; elements of deep perspectives with flat all-over applications of paint; raw and purposefully overworked canvas; subtle gradations of grey with areas of solid and bright colors, Claire blurs our usual tools of perception and art historical references.

Some of these paintings can be hung vertically or horizontally, and this possible rotation only emphasizes their abstractness and lack of grounding in a rational Euclidian space.

Rather than creating compositions that would be recognizable based on assumptions, Claire’s work offers an opportunity to subvert expectations. The work is conceptual in that it questions the image-making process and the knowledge necessary to create meaning.

The lack of a strategy is the strategy, with the painting becoming a representation of its own process, evidence of time spent.

Claire lives in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

www.andreaclairestudio.com.