perri neri: SHifting Ground
Exhibition Dates: April 26 - May 21, 2022
Reception: Thursday, April 28, 5pM - 8pm
Artist’s Talk - Saturday, April 30th, from 3PM - 5pm: Florida based artists Perri Neri and Lilian Garcia-Roig will be in conversation with JoAnne McFarland at the Painting Center talking about their relationships with identity, place, and belonging.
“I am trying to see if it is possible to hold onto several moments of perception simultaneously.” – Perri Neri
The Painting Center is pleased to present Shifting Ground, new paintings by Perri Neri. Neri has always been fascinated by the visceral palpability of the human body. Living, changing, perishable figures are coupled, stretched, fragmented, and expanded. Quick angles and edges against slow curves produce a speed to the eye. “I started using the white line as a way to map out the energy and movement,” Neri explains, “and I can also think of them as rays of light that, instead of reflecting off fleshy surfaces, penetrate and drive through them. I love the idea of that.”
The power of the drawn line and drama of color come together at the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction in Neri's depiction of the human form. Using a limited palette of luminous red, blue, and yellow, some body parts are painted into focus while others remain drawings. The energy of the bodies, their raw human qualities, are often confrontational in their improvised, non finito appearance. The raw canvas absorbs, consumes the painted marks and traces of line, and holds onto them like a memory.
For Shifting Ground, Neri has discarded the stretcher bar structures and loosely stapled the soft linen canvas to the gallery walls. Neri welcomes the risk and the change and the transformation that come from the act of making. Some canvases are allowed to slip down the wall, while others extend further onto the floor. The multiplicity of the fragmented and varied forms, bonded to an unfettered canvas, speaks to the mutability of human behavior itself.
Perri Neri is an artist and curator currently living in Tampa, Florida, and is the Founder and Archive Director of Refrigerator Poetry Visual Art Archive (www.refrigeratorpoetry.com). Neri holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and has exhibited work in New York City at Ceres Gallery, Caelum Gallery, AIR in Brooklyn, and was a featured artist in Rachel Roy Showroom in Manhattan. In the Tampa Bay area, a retrospective of her work was exhibited at The Morean Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg (2020). Other exhibitions include the Orlando Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art, and Tampa Museum of Art. Neri is currently represented by The Painting Center in New York City where she sits on the Executive Board. Her curatorial projects include “I Am My Best Work (2020), “New Optics” (2020), “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love,” (2021), and “Indivisible Spectrum.” (2022). Neri’s work has been featured in two volumes of Studio Visit Magazine and was featured in Honeysuckle Magazine (2015), Women in Contemporary Art, Where are They Now?
On Saturday, April 30, from 3-5pm: Florida based artists Perri Neri and Lilian Garcia-Roig will be in conversation with JoAnne McFarland at The Painting Center talking about their relationships with identity, place, and belonging.
