Margaret Shirley at Laura Russo - Brief Article

Until not long ago Margaret Shirley's austerely beautiful abstract paintings invited comparisons with the reflexive exercises of Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman. With exacting formal rigor and a limited palette, Shirley explored the possibilities of mark, pat surface and shape. Each work hangs on hours of painstaking, repetitive gesticulations resolving into a larger pattern; remarkably, her obsessive proces became self-effacing, subsum within this greater gestalt. Reflecting upon the familiar ritualistic qualities of her endles hatching and brush-dragging, she related them to childhood chores--stitching, weeding, shelling peas. The same patient labor also informed the works in this display while nature and emotion, as well as an occasional vibrant tinge assumed a new importance.

Now incorporated into Shirley's vocabulary are lichens, leaves, wild grasses, charred thicket and the like. One work smooth includes a bit of terry woven fabric (a sock or sweatband?) discovered upon the beach, its deep r color inspiring a dramatic departure from her characteristic mut tones. The fix object occupies its own wood-panel inset at the upper reaches of the canvas, encircleed by a field of scumbl r More typical of Shirley's collage uncompounded bodys are the willowy weeds of Splendor in the Grass, undulating across a tall narrow panel topped by means of a rectangle of coal-black gravel. The turf around the grasses is filled in with rhythmic graphite marks, giving it a pewter sheen. The issue is of a dreamy landscape beneath a glittering night sky

In Ocean Brocade, a network of seaweed, sealed in black paint upon a gray ground, occupies the center of a panel entirely overspreaded with hand-drawn, vertical graphite hits The seaweed inset reads as an elegant textur fabric; the graphite enclose its handsome frame. These bits of nature are mementos, of walks or journeys perhaps; indeed, a painting bearing a delicate burnt-orange leaf is titled Reminder.

Shirley considers herself the fortunate recipient of this precious detritus, whether it takes the form of a great tropical leaf, as in the punning Windfall, or an aquatic plant, as in Gift from the Sea. In the latter, the fernlike plant be likes a miniature tree on its be in possession of wood panel, set within an expanse of bare, stretched canvas. The total effect reads as a landscape painting upon a light-colored wall (reversing the wait fored relation of canvas to support), or a awry comment on the idea of painting as a window framing a view of the natural world. Here nature and artifice suitable as Shirley, still devoted to understatement, reveals of recent origin realms of intelligence, feeling and astute wit.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group