Patricia Spergel: Selected Paintings 1995-2020
Exhibition Dates: November 24 – December 30, 2020
Reception: Thursday, december 3, 5pm - 8pm
Boundless, 2020, Oil on canvas, 16” x 20”
Totem, 1995, Oil on canvas, 16” x 14”
The Painting Center is pleased to present a new exhibition by Patricia Spergel titled Selected Paintings 1995 – 2020 on view from November 24th through December 30th. For this third and final exhibition as a gallery member, she invited two of her closest graduate school friends, Carol March and Katharine Umsted, to select a group of older paintings that still resonate with the current work she is creating. The artists all received their MFAs from the School of Visual Arts in 1990 and have stayed in close contact since. In late February, just before NY State’s shelter-in-place restrictions, the three artists gathered in her studio to go through stacks of older paintings. Their initial selection has been further edited to allow one wall of the Project Room to display a salon style grouping of small paintings on paper that Spergel made at her makeshift home painting table while her studio building was closed from mid-March through July.
The affinities between the older and newest paintings speak to the continuity of themes that have been present in the artist’s work for decades - filtered light, multiple layers of paint, and a vocabulary of interacting shapes repelling and attracting one another, often combined with both distinct and obscured linear elements.
Patricia Spergel was born in 1960 in Philadelphia and graduated from Cornell University in 1983 with a B.A. in French linguistics and a B.F.A. in printmaking. After living and working in both San Francisco and Philadelphia, she moved to New York in 1988 and received her M.F.A. in painting from the School of Visual Arts in 1990. After graduation, Ms. Spergel had a studio for eleven years in the meatpacking district in NYC and then moved her studio to the ArtsWestchester building in White Plains in 2001. In 2004, the artist was invited by her alma mater present a one person exhibition at the Tjaden Gallery at Cornell University. She has also been included in numerous group shows nationally and internationally. Spergel exhibited at The Painting Center with Sarah Lutz in January 2017 and had a solo show in October 2018. In addition, she curated two recent exhibitions with Gallery director Shazzi Thomas: Cultivate Your Own Garden in March 2018 and About Face in June 2019. She lives and works in Westchester County, NY.
For more information on the artist, please visit www.patriciaspergel.com.
