Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Pibal in its project space. The exhibition will run from April 1 through May 1, with an opening reception on Thursday, April 1, from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The show will consist of a group of black paintings in which a deceptively simple composition shifts subtly from image to image. By limiting her palette, Pibal foregrounds the aspect of her process that is most concerned with how an abstract visual language operates.

Each of the acrylic-on-aluminum paintings in the exhibition features a composition of hard-edged geometric motifs on a black background. Though they are all of relatively small scale, no two paintings are the exact same size, so that each represents its own unique situation. Moving from one painting to the next, however, a sense that one is experiencing many of views of a single overall situation also becomes apparent. The sequencing by which these paintings relate to one another in formal terms is open-ended, non-linear, and evocative rather than overt or didactic.

Despite their limit imposed by the palette, the paintings maintain a sense of natural, even crepuscular light, the light of transitional moments. Pibal has long been interested in the expressionistic potential of color, even (perhaps especially) when it is rendered as a smooth, uninflected ground for her linear compositions. Within the narrow range of color in the paintings on view, there is surprising variation from one painting to the next, as Pibal activates oppositions between foreground and background, edge and center, proximity and distance.

The results of this variation are seen in the variety of moods that are evoked, so that formal experimentation becomes a metaphor and a signifier for states of mind and feeling. While there is some relation to the way that verbal language conjures observation and experience, Pibal seeks out the places where meaning escapes the province of words. Many of the paintings’ titles point toward this, in that they consist of words that seem to hover between uncanny familiarity and nonsense.

The compositional motifs employed in the work also oscillate between the known and the unexpected, and seem to refer not only to the history of abstract painting but to a wide range of cultural sources, popular and otherwise. While it is impossible to ignore the lineage of black and/or black-on-black abstract painting when looking at these works, forms present in landscape, digital media, architecture, and photography also readily come to mind. As they are seen in sequence, or all at once, the forms––and the paintings themselves––begin to suggest oblique narratives that build upon, contradict, and challenge one another.

Ann Pibal is also currently the subject of a one-person exhibition at The Suburban in Chicago. Her work has been included in exhibitions at numerous museums and galleries, including P.S.1, Mass MOCA, The Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Paula Cooper the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Musuem 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, NYFA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work was recently included in Robert Nickas’ Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, published by Phaidon. She lives and works in Brooklyn and North Bennington, Vermont.