Xavier Hufkens is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Lesley Vance in the gallery. The exhibition includes both new oil paintings on linen and watercolours on paper.

Lesley Vance’s paintings exploit the full potential of contemporary painting. Her abstract compositions accentuate the material qualities of paint but at the same time demonstrate the medium’s ability to create fictional spaces. Vance begins by creating improvised arrangements of objects in her studio and photographing them. Working from these images, with brush and palette knife, she works wet-on-wet creating a kind of sculptural space where paint sits upon paint in one uniform layer. Vance is primarily concerned with colour, texture, and light, but some elements of the imagery she begins with are often preserved. They are included in an intuitive play of shapes, colours and movements that seem to fold in and out of each other. A whole new pictorial space is created, which the artist describes as ‘a tactile and at the same time completely fictional abstraction, that pushes and pulls and complicates spatial norms.’

(text source: Xavier Hufkens)

Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2012, oil on linen, 50.8 x 40.3 cm; Courtesy: the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels / Photo-credit: © Brian Forrest, Los Angeles.

More about Lesley Vance (b. 1977, Milwaukee, WI)

Inspired by the seventeenth-century Spanish still-life tradition, Lesley Vance carefully arranges and lights objects such as fruits or shells. The artist then photographs these arrangements, and the resulting images serve as the basis for her abstract paintings. Vance creates these paintings by manipulating wet paint with a palette knife, erasing and editing her strokes until she feels that the final form has revealed itself. Although these works lack any perceptible trace of the original photographic composition, they retain the intimacy and refinement of a traditional still life.

(text source: Whitney Museum of American Art)

Education:  MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 2003. BFA, The University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 2000.

Further information here...(ArtSlant Profile) (Artist's Website) (Galleries:Xavier Hufkens, David Kordansky Gallery)

(Image on top: Lesley Vance, Untitled, 2012 , oil on linen , 45.7 x 35.6 cm; Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens.)