Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of paintings by Ann Pibal. Her work has been seen in several important group exhibitions recently, including Greater New York at P.S. 1 in 2005, and she has won awards and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Pibal’s paintings feature deceptively simple compositions that utilize geometric motifs such as targets, rectangles, lines, and open cubes. Pibal works in both small-scale and large-scale formats, though no two paintings are exactly the same size. The compositions, executed in acrylic on thin aluminum panels, suggest shifting situations, motion or entropy; there is an active approach to spatial relationships, so that small spaces often denote much larger ones. The geometric figures themselves are sometimes repeated, but with slight differences, juggling accepted notions of symmetry and balance. The sense of play that runs through these trends in the work makes each painting a place where fixed or defined figures and forms become flexible upon closer viewing.

This extends to Pibal’s use of color and light. In particular, Pibal has been interested in the light of transition, light that denotes the passage of time; and in twilight and dawn, the periods when forms appear to change, blur, and undergo transformations. Though the work is not specifically narrative, it does pit the possibility of literary, rational understanding against the irrational or sensual aspects of physical experience. Color is perhaps the primary sphere in which this juxtaposition takes place, in which space is marked for its emotional and psychological characteristics.

Pibal’s paintings demonstrate a wide range of affective states and intellectual approaches, as well as a keen awareness of the historical challenges posed by abstract painting, and by American abstract painting in particular. Each painting, arrived at intuitively, approaches the condition of language without coalescing into totalizing statement (a fact suggested by their titles, which are mostly comprised of invented words that bear resemblances to existing ones). As a group, the paintings become a pluralistic conversation not only about the challenges and possibilities inherent to abstraction, but the ways in which historical context and imagination intersect.