Horton Gallery - Chelsea

The gallery is pleased to announce Fully Charged by Brooklyn-based artist Palma Blank.

Blank’s boldly colored compositions emphasize their own meta-structure. Their diagonal lines respond to the architecture of the stretched canvas and to the various ways of compositionally dividing the painting’s rectangular shape. While shifts in line thickness at times implicate subtle illusionistic depth, these lines also contribute to a low relief topography that reveals the process of the paint’s application. Even the color relationships, initiated through automatic, instinctual decisions, are then left to form their own internal structures that the artist abides by. Such internal structures build phenomenological, durational experiences rather than specific illusionistic representations.

The color palettes that result from these initial instinctual choices may come to correspond with the artist’s personal experiences, symbols, and interests. Blank is inspired especially by color relationships of the latest athletic equipment, technologies, and trends. The act of playing sports and games is of particular interest to Blank because she understands the boundaries, energy, and flux they involve to operate also in her painterly process. This correlation can be seen best when a strict adherence to certain compositional patterns is interrupted by a fast and unexpected line, color, or change in direction.

Interested as well is the changing visual experience that's developing during the digital age, Blank creates images that reveal strata of signification. Complicating the declaration “what you see is what you see” made by Frank Stella, whose work is echoed in Blank’s meticulous stripes and diagonals, Blank’s paintings urge viewers to unearth the various structures of her work. The construction of the work's physical form, the covert layers of symbolic meaning, and the subtly shifting optical effects all act as transparent layers to be worked through visually during an encounter with one of Blank's paintings.

Palma Blank (b. 1979, Norwalk, CT) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout New York. Fully Charged is the artist's first solo exhibition with Horton Gallery and her first major New York solo exhibition.