Paintings

Elliott Templeton Fine Arts is delighted to present a solo exhibition of paintings by the New York artist Maureen Dougherty. This is Maureen's first exhibition with the gallery and her second solo exhibition in New York City, following her 2023 show at Cheim & Read. Dougherty's portraits in this exhibition leap across art historical time. The characters appear cast from a parade of historical milieus—most notably the interwar styles of Weimar and Deco—yet float just outside of a fixed temporality. They take their stage in a theatrical mode indicative of Walt Kuhn's portraits of circus and vaudeville performers. In this way, the subjects' psychologies seem tethered to their historical disjunction, as witnesses to the passing of time (and perhaps, its cultural consequences). Abstraction is introduced into the paintings in the shifting, dreamlike grounds that the subjects occupy. Ranging from thinned, textured gestures to the crystallization of geometric motifs, Dougherty's strokes contain a powerful tension that suspends her personae in pictorial space. The effect is often a subtle manipulation of figure and ground amid the broader, more figurative scene at hand. Additionally, included in this exhibition are abstract works from Dougherty's Harlequin series, capturing a similar choreography of tension within the brightly colored diamond weaves. Maureen Dougherty (b. 1958, New York) studied painting at Carnegie Mellon University and the New York Studio School. Recent solo exhibitions include Blum Gallery, Los Angeles (2024) and Cheim & Read, New York (2023). As a documentary filmmaker, Dougherty runs her own production company, Mojo Films. Dougherty lives and works in New York.