Maxine Fine
A Retrospective

Opening reception: Wedsnesday, November 12, 6-8pm

Wednesday - Saturday 1-7pm and by appointment

Closing reception: Saturday, December 13, 4-6pm

 

For Immediate Release:

NEW YORK, NY, NOVEMBER 2008 – gallery onetwentyeight is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of paintings and photographs by Maxine Fine. The show is accompanied by a full-color catalogue by art historian Flavia Rando, Ph. D., designed by Ann Pachner, Working Artist Ink. The exhibition is on view from November 12 – December 13, 2008 at gallery onetwenty eight, located at 128 Rivington Street, NYC .

Maxine Fine’s painting, sculpture, and photography are brought together for the first time in a memorial exhibition celebrating the artist’s life and dedication to her art. Fine was born in 1942 and lived in NYC in the 70’s and early 80’s. A pioneer of the Feminist and Lesbian Art Movements, Fine’s work, a visual memoir at once achingly intimate and overwhelming in scale, explores concerns of communal significance – gender, childhood, sexuality, illness, spirituality, and mortality – articulating a shift of focus in the art world.

Fine’s narrative is achieved through a vocabulary that speaks of an intimate knowledge of art histories, re/creating color, form, and gesture as the language of her own history. From the searing work of the 1980’s, monumental multi-panel figurative paintings, to her most recent work, searching self-portrait photographs taken as she faced the recognition of her mortality as a survivor of breast cancer, her allusion to the fragmented and vulnerable body haunts the viewer. Maxine Fine wrote, “The figure is always there in some way, it stands for my presence.”

Using multiple panels which “permitted [her] to move in and out of the framework of the rectangle, allowing sculpture to be present once again, but in a new way,” she begins her paintings with a ground of black gesso mixed with graphite, a fine talc-like powder “as a way of honoring the emptiness from which everything arises.” This layer, textured like earth, matte and luminescent, holds light, illuminating subsequent layers of color, so that one becomes aware of other possibilities and meanings. Through an accomplished use of color, scale and figuration, the viewer senses the fluidity between surface and structure which becomes “a meditation, an unfolding.”

Maxine Fine is the recipient of three national awards for her mature work: a 1998 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a 1999 Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a 2003 Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Visual Art Award.

For additional information please contact Flavia Rando, 212-674-4041   frando@earthlink.net

128 Rivington St.
(bet. Essex & Norfolk)
NYC, NY 10002
212 674 0244

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