Larissa Goldston Gallery is pleased to present Monochromes, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of work by Amy Vogel. The exhibition will be on view from March 25 through April 30. There will be an opening reception for the artist on March 24 from 6 to 8pm.

The history of the monochrome painting is a history of nuances and extremes: from Turner’s chiaroscuro studies to Malevich’s ‘White on White’ to Richard Artschwager’s Celotex paintings, It is an endless history of unresolved tensions that get played out over the mutable surface of a painting.

Drawing on her experiences in the rural landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the urban streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Vogel’s new monochromatic paintings are muted and quiet; they transform nature by depriving it of color. Nature in these paintings is never far from human nature and the touch of human presence. The place is only incidental in relation to how it is ultimately shaped by the people who move through it and by the blur of time. The paintings are themselves blurs – wipes, smears, smudges, streaks, washes, splashes – but these marks are less impressions than they are marks of existence in a world without clear definition.

Amy Vogel lives and works in Chicago, where she is Chair of the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited with Paul Kotula Projects, Detroit, and Air de Paris, Paris, as well as Dan Devening Projects & Editions, Chicago.