The Painting Center presents two New York painters, Anne Russinof and Francis O’Shea, whose interests lie in abstraction, pattern and personal narrative. They are pleased to be showing together for the first time.

For Anne Russinof painting is a foray into liquid territory, with depths, shallows, and overlapping orders. She attempts to catch the process of change in some of its “endless forms,” invoking Darwin and the way in which complex structures come from simple beginnings. The painting is a snapshot of that moment in which the flux of jumbling and crowded shapes has been temporarily arrested. Nature’s accretions and interruptions are here contained by the organizing principle that is the canvas edge.

Anne Russinof is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has been a resident at the Yaddo and Millay Art Colonies and is currently a member of The Painting Center. More of her work can be seen at http://www.annerussinof.com. She has shown in group and two-person shows in and around the New York area, and this is her first solo show.

Francis O’Shea : This series of paintings explores the conversation between the patterned plane, the organic forms that float on top of it, and the edge of the canvas. Tensionand balance are critical. The space in the paintings is quite shallow; the organic forms (enlarged as if seen under a microscope) are capable at any moment of scuttling off, coming to rest in a different position, shaping a new relationship with another form and engaging in an entirely new dialog with the pattern. Finding the proper arrangement and the space between the elements is the challenge.

Francis O’Shea is a graduate of Connecticut College and received an MA and an MFA from the University of Iowa. He has had a residency at Yaddo and has shown both in and out of New York, most recently at the Kouros Gallery in New York.