VALERIE GILES: WORKS ON PAPER
September 10 – October 10, 2009
Opening Reception: September 10, 6-8pm

Danese is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition of drawings by Valerie Giles. The opening reception will be held Thursday, September 10th from 6 pm to 8 pm.

Valerie Giles’s drawings unfurl an intimate world of assured line and fluid gesture, merging scientific inquiry and the natural world with the cadence of creation, automatism and fantasy. It is in these invented microcosmic systems that she explores the intersection of the real and transcendental, the mechanical and organic, the present and past.

There are two distinctive subjects in Giles’s work: abstraction, and mimesis. In her non-representational drawings, spontaneous skeins of curvilinear marks slide, skip and turn across the paper, recalling Cy Twombly’s Roman Notes and Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain series. Broadly based on her love of all music – especially jazz, Giles transcribes its improvisation and immediacy with rolling, beckoning lines. The more realist drawings however, abandon the Dionysian line of her abstract work, and instead engage in the extreme limits of rendered detail, meditating on the biological world. Exactingly controlled and precise, the nautilus forms convey a synthesized biomorphism transformed by imagination and virtuosity.

Working on a tinted surface, the artist’s lines and forms appear translucent, ephemeral. Sparsely highlighted with pods and bursts of color she draws the viewer into her orbit, oscillating between bundled abstraction and allusion.

Valerie Giles work reflects her longstanding study, interest and practice in the natural sciences. This is her first solo exhibition.

An online catalogue for this exhibition can be found at www.danese.com. For further information please contact Carol Corey or Alexandra Woodworth at 212/223-2227 or alexandra@danese.com.

 

 

  home