Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street, 212-242-0599
Chelsea
January 13 - February 12, 2011
Reception: Thursday, January 13, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of new drawings by Allyson Strafella.
Allyson Strafella has been making drawings with a typewriter for 17 years, creating marks that have become her own visual language: a drawing language ‘written’ by type, and a written language drawn as mark and form. With each strike of the key, she pushes the paper to its physical limit. The typewriter is her tool, though not easily recognizable because her process is uniquely her own.
Mostly intimate in scale, each drawing is made by using a single key of punctuation mark. Strafella works the individual marks into densely concentrated compositions that derive from natural and constructed forms. When the marks are transferred from carbon to plain paper, the cerulean blue, deep red, vivid black or forest green forms pour on the paper’s surface in such dense concentration they begin to eat their way through the material. When the marks are transferred from carbon to paper, negatives of her drawings are also produced. Together, this drawing duality creates a movement of recurring forms.
Allyson Strafella’s work has been exhibited for nearly two decades, most recently in group exhibitions at the University of Albany, the Norton Museum of Art and the Katonah Museum of Art. Strafella is represented in numerous public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Hammer Museum; and the Yale Art Museum. The artist lives and works in upstate New York.