Schmidt Contemporary Art: Friday, 11 September 2009

Anne Appleby: Recent Paintings and Recent Prints from Wildwood Press
September 11, - October 10, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept. 11, 6:00-8:00pm
Gallery Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-5:00pm; Sat 10:00-4:00pm & by appointment

Anne Appleby opens this season with an exhibition of prints and paintings reveling the deep connection to nature that has long been the focus of her work. The paintings are multi-layered with sensual color and reveal aspects of the natural world both in its growth and in its death cycles. Mood & color, time & place, change & stability, purpose & freedom, truth & uncertainty, surface and spirit -- all these juxtapositions can be woven and interchanged to provide explanations of her work. Appleby's work is technically demanding; she embraces the challenge of using materials to capture the ephemeral and ever changing processes of nature. In her rigor and exacting execution, along with selective and appealing color choices - each painting or print is itself a creation not only of an artwork, but also a continuation of the very nature and connection to process that leads her into the studio.

The second part of this dual exhibition is the result of Appleby's collaboration with Maryanne Simmons at Wildwood Press. Working with Ms. Simmons extraordinary hand made papers the artist and the printer developed a process of saturating the paper with multiple colored inks and then placed one sheet directly over another showing both the first surface and a hint of what lies below through the rough deckled edges. The color relationships expressed through texture offer a very special body of work, an impressive artist/printmaker combination ultimately offers a complimentary yet challenging outcome.

Regardless of medium, Anne Appleby makes physical the unseen. Nature is her portal; renewal her process; revelation her ending place. Her reductive abstraction that for some may seem simplistic at a glance will reveal a world of intensity when the viewer is willing to become immersed. This work offers the viewer the time to reflect on the complexity of our relationship with the physical world to which these pieces are a direct response. The hope is that the viewer is allowed to truly merge with the work, both in terms of emotion and spirituality.

SCHMIDT CONTEMPORARY ART
615 NORTH GRAND BLVD.
ST. LOUIS, MO 63103
314 575-2648