Lorraine Tady: Small Abstract Paintings

exhibition dates: January 4 - 29, 2011

reception: Thursday, January 6, 6 - 8 PM

Surplus MoundWEB.jpg
Thomas Berding, Lost in Conversion, 2016, oil, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 69” x 62”.jpg

The exhibition “Lorraine Tady: Small Abstract Paintings” will be in the Painting Center’s Project Room and will present a selection of small scale recent paintings representative of a larger, ongoing body of work. Tady is the 2010 recipient of the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Award, which has generously supported this exhibition. Tady’s work is a continued exploration of architectural and mechanical abstraction, intuitive and haptic forms built with a painterly sensibility yet linear and drawn. Her imaginary theater contains forms that float, hover, meander, grind, churn, diddle, idle, seek, work or partake in some rhythmic yet structurally asymmetrical activity. She states: “In my work mechanical-like systems are subjected to or are participants in an indirect and formal examination of structure; or a subverted diagrammatic, engineering process. Parts are extracted, analyzed, and re-translated, using both digital and analog tools. I propose questions in the investigation and set up specific games, parameters and rules to respond to in the work’s progression. The language of line propels the work, and I use it to help make visible the parts, and to find the answer to ‘what connects to this, how is this connected to that, etc.’

Lorraine Tady attended the Yale/Norfolk School of Art in 1988 with the Ellen Battell - Stoeckel Fellowship. She received her BFA in painting from Ohio’s Wright State University in 1989 and, on full scholarship, her MFA in 1991 from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. Tady has had numerous solo shows at the Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, TX as well as participated in group exhibitions nationally including Seattle, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and SPACES in Cleveland. Her work was included in New American Paintings #48 in 2003. She was awarded the Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art in 1993 and was a 2007 finalist for the Huntington Art Prize. She was nominated for the Arthouse Texas Prize, the Joan Mitchell Grant and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant. Tady has been Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Dallas, Southern Methodist University, and Baylor University. She currently is a Clinical Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas. Her work is in collections including American Airlines and Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as private collections in Dallas and New York.