Everyday Improvisations

The gallery presents Fran Shalom's exhibition Everyday Improvisations. Fran Shalom is a modernist abstract painter with a pop sensibility and a penchant for improvisation. Her work balances the formal with the playful, paring down shapes and ideas into their most basic forms. To counter the chaos of everyday life, she gravitates towards elemental shapes with defined edges, resulting in an appearance of control and order (however illusory). In her most recent work, she has been loosening up that control. The shapes reference the human body but are open to interpretation. Animated by bright, cartoony colors and figure/ground relationships, she thinks of the paintings as ambiguous characters who inhabit her studio keeping her company and often engaging in silent conversation. She loves ambiguity and has learned to be comfortable with not knowing. In Zen, there is a wonderful saying: 'Not knowing is most intimate.' It suggests approaching something with open-minded and whole-hearted curiosity. She tries to begin her paintings in this way, with a willingness to be present with uncertainty, and with the confidence that the process will result in work that both satisfies and inspires. Fran Shalom has exhibited widely throughout the United States, including solo shows at Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, and Hunterdon Museum, Clinton, NJ. She is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and residencies at MacDowell Fellowship and Art Omi. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York City.

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New York, NY