Marianne Vitale
Presser
8 May – 26 June 2010
Deborah Colton Gallery
2445 North Boulevard
Houston Texas 77098
Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the quixotic New York artist Marianne Vitale. With large, vibrant paintings, dense and thick with pigment, and relief sculptures suggesting enlarged body parts, Vitale hypertrophies the intricate intimacy of her pen and ink drawings into a churning no-fly zone over the contemporary. Accompanying the canvases I Got Rid of the Horse and Now There’s Just You, and Fifth Phase Handsome and two wall sculptures from her Healthcare Series – Navel and Elbow, (all 2010) Vitale has constructed one of her hybrid sculptures, in-situ, out of found material, debris, and a junked mini motor-bike – Presser (2010). Also on view are two series of drawings: Flushed Up and Ploughing (2009), five colorful and riddling pen and ink compositions, and Copper Line (2010), nine fast and forcible sequential graphite drawings on copper-coated paper (2010).
Vitale’s video Patron is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York for the Whitney Biennial 2010, in which she delivers a nine-minute abusive rant “like a psychotic drill sergeant” parodying authoritarian posturing.
Marianne Vitale is a New York artist working in various mediums. Her sculptural practice often evokes an idea of the natural world remade from what has been discarded and abandoned. Vitale freezes forms into make-shift structures, fantastic creatures, hybrid animals and contorted beasts that can appear both fragile and menacing. Sometimes sympathetic, often uneasy, Vitale’s sculptures pull the tension between figure and abstraction, mid-process of either melting or forming, with skin dripping from their frames. These extracts stretch, move, coil, hide, and invite to mark an encounter of sinister illusoriness. When using performance and video, Vitale draws on the instinctive yet carefully sculpted absurdity apparent in her drawings and sculptures, with an added personal physicality that creates a visceral, even combative relationship between artist and audience. Vitale’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, SculptureCenter, White Columns, Kunstverein NY, Brooklyn Museum, all in New York; Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas; IBID Projects, London, UK; and the Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, England.