Frederieke Taylor gallery announces its fourth one person show with Barbara Broughel. This exhibition will consist of new oil paintings on wood, emphasizing the artist’s perspectival grid that contributed to their formation. The show is a significant continuation of the artist’s show with the gallery in 2001, entitled “Perspective, Optics and the Legibility of Nature.” As with her previous show at the gallery, this new work is part of Broughel’s ongoing investigation into historical innovations in artists’ tools, and their impact on perception.

In The Broken Grid series, Broughel flips convention by viewing The Delft School of painting through the lens of the perspectival grid (a tool designed for rendering objects in perspective without distortion). By privileging the artist’s tool over compositional convention, and by making it the focal point of the artwork’s composition, Broughel brings to the forefront a way of seeing which objectifies the artist’s experience in the studio; a way of seeing which would have been denied to the work’s audience, and completely eradicated from the final product.

As with other works in her Artificial Eye series, The Broken Grid paintings bring a somewhat structuralist approach to understanding the working practices of another period, both through her use of the same tools for her investigations, and ultimately, through the production of artworks as her final investigative form.

“The subject matter, the painting materials and the obvious employment of the camera obscura all point to the time and place the work is referencing (let us say Delft), and as such, they are completely conventional for painting of this period. What is unconventional, or even radical for the period, is the composition and the way it fractures the realism of the image, at the same time that it references the tool which allows for that realism.” (Broughel)

Barbara Broughel is an artist based in Connecticut and New York, with an extensive history of exhibitions. Over the years, Broughel’s work has taken a variety of forms, usually presented as installations and investigative projects, including games, films, video-works, sculptures, photographs, paintings and drawings. Her work has been shown at various museums internationally and in the United States, including the Queens Museum of Art, Aldrich Museum, CT, Katonah Museum, NY, San Jose Museum, CA, the Hermit Foundation, Czech Republic, Kilkenny Castle, Ireland, Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau, Switzerland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland, and many others. She has had commissions in Europe, the United States and the Far East, including recent installation works at the Sanskriti Institute in New Delhi and at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, Holland.